


Maybe In Another Life

by JessaLRynn



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon, Author's Favorite, Complicated Relationships, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Time Travel, Time War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 20:08:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6023079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JessaLRynn/pseuds/JessaLRynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The War has always been raging, the Universe has always been ending, and it has always been their fault. Another life, another love...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is an alternate universe of an a universe alteration - or maybe that's the other way around. Created long before Matt Smith left his throne, it took me two years to write. It was blood sweat and tears the whole way. I love this piece and I hope you will, too.

_For the first nine hundred years of my life, nothing happened. Not anything. Not ever._

_We lived, if you could call it that, under the threat of invasion. Our little burned out shell in what was left of the Universe was a barren rock, and those of us who lived there - we called ourselves the Survivors - were dying more than living every day._

_Legends said it was all our fault, this war between They Who Destroy. We might, in theory, be the most intelligent people left in the scraps and rubble of eternity, but not one of us dared to even try to offer our assistance. The defenders would kill us as soon as the enemy._

_We had only a few things left to us under our burning orange sky. We had very little food, water, or clothing, but we had very little need for it. Our world was an old, old one, made of mountain ranges that rose from a shattered subcontinent, and those mountains were full of caves, tunnels, and rock fall that protected us from the elements and the War. We were reborn when we died most of the time, our bodies burning with energy fatal to most of the species that hunted us. And our world slipped out of reality from time to time, falling easily into the cracks and glitches caused by this War that had been raging through time since before the races fighting it had existed._

_I was one of the youngest males left, not even 1000 years old and already in my fourth body. My elders didn't make much of my chances for survival for another millennia, but then, I was certain, from the fires that burned across the night heavens, that we wouldn't have a universe to survive in for much longer._

_But that was before the Eventuality. That was before the Seedling and the Girl with Golden Eyes._

_I have always been called the Doctor, and this is the last story I will ever tell. This is the story of how I died._

**

They knew the world had fallen back through the glitch by the sudden rain of flaming debris across the surface. The Doctor, on watch and quite certain the transition was early, hastily added the anomaly to his calculations. He had a small computer that he'd built himself from old parts lying about and the odd piece of salvaged wreckage. He immediately set it to work on the situation.

The computer agreed with him. The Doctor's blue eyes scanned the flickering screen. He freed a hand to rake it through his wayward, tousled curls. Something that was definitely not right was happening, of that much he was absolutely certain.

Before he could have the computer confirm his theory, a woman's voice appeared in the flaming darkness. "This is definitely not right," she said.

The Doctor had never heard the voice before in his life, and yet he felt like his every cell trembled in response to her. He quickly told himself it was only the fact that he didn't recognize her. He knew every single living person on this abandoned rock, after all, and both of the not-quite-living as well.

"Who's there?" he called, his voice a bit soft from disuse. He had a tendency to go quiet for days and just let his thoughts do his speaking to the Survivors. (Not that they could comprehend his thoughts, when they flew at a million miles a minute through his head, but he supposed the noise was comforting.)

"Who are you?" the woman's voice called back. A light appeared, some sort of powered and generated thing, not the dull flicker of firelight, nor the sickly color-coded lasers of the various types of death brought down by They Who Destroy.

"Identify yourself, now," he insisted. "I warn you, I'm armed." He wasn't. He hardly even armed himself in the hunting parties that saved their lives during the very long winters.

"Yes, whatever, you're armed, I'm legged. Between us, we might have a full set of limbs."

The Doctor forced himself not to laugh, but it was a very near thing. He also didn't say that he'd thought almost the exact same thing (in nearly the same words) before. "I'm the Doctor," he said. "Who does that make you, then?"

A warm, living body wrapped itself around him before the Doctor could even figure out what happened. One minute he was standing there, the most lonely man in any world, and the next there was a stranger clinging to him like he was the most important thing in the universe.

"Doctor," she said breathlessly. "I can't believe I've finally found you!"

He stared at the girl in amazement, studying her features in the murky, burning night. He towered over her, and her trembling body was far warmer than his, probably her natural state. Something he couldn't explain, something gold and unfathomable, hovered around her. He didn't understand her at all. "Who are you?" he asked.

The woman detached herself from his arms only far back enough to look up at him. She studied, mainly, his eyes. The Doctor tried to hold still to let her, but he was hardly sure of what she was looking for there. Finally, slowly, she nodded. "You're him... or you could be." She let him go and stepped away from him entirely, looking at the scenery with worried, and slowly angering eyes. "This is very much not right."

A much older Survivor, a man called Borusa, arrived to relieve the Doctor of his post. As soon as he spotted the girl, Borusa demanded to know who she was and what exactly was happening.

The girl shoved long blonde hair out of her face and straightened the heavy blue garment she wore. "I'm so sorry," she said to the Doctor. "What you musta thought." She looked again at the devastation and turned back to both of them, her eyes glowing, sad and darkly brilliant in the dimness. "Call me the Wolf."

**

At first, she kept quiet among them, learning their names, their personalities, their way of life. She sank herself into raising sparse, weak vegetables and chasing down rare wildlife. She scribbled almost constantly in a small leather book she had with her. She helped with the mending, minded the two children, took her turn on the watch. She made a mean campfire stew. In short, she became one of them, and very quickly, too.

She sang in their language, sang very old songs they'd forgotten or never knew. The words made sense to them all, though there was usually puzzlement when she sang, because some of the words described things that could not be. She became a teacher as well as a student. She gave no more of her attention to the Doctor than she did to any of the others, but he always felt like an object of fascination when she was around.

When the world slipped back into the Universe's pocket, the Survivors celebrated as they had always done. That was when it truly began, because something happened that night at the fire.

The Wolf moved with an aurora all around her, scattering wonder in her vivid wake. She slipped in and out of the firelight, all enigmatic and strange, and her eyes held all the shadows of eternity in their dark and shining depths. 

All at once, it seemed to the Doctor that he knew her. It felt almost like her thoughts joined the chorus of the Survivors, but it was different too, because he felt like this recognition was for him alone. 

The woman who became the Wolf was alien, not just here but every where. No power contained her, no strength withstood her, no one controlled her. She was a force of nature in her way, like a storm, like time itself. All the same, she was only a person, only a woman, who had been born to a mortal life. She lived and laughed and maybe even loved before, but somehow she was here, where all of that was gone, and she was alone.

The Doctor pushed himself away from his idling perch and found the Wolf trading time with the other women, a laughing soprano crowd. He picked out Flavia's sober dignity, Romana's elegant cheer, Rodan's flummoxed curiosity in the voices as he edged his way through. 

The moment he reached the strange girl's side, the whole crowd gave a unanimous giggle and wandered off. Left alone with her, the Doctor abruptly realized that one of the qualities he'd been avoiding about her was her appearance. 

Her hair and her face had been decorated special for the occasion, though her clothes were the same she always wore. "You look beautiful," the Doctor heard a voice say, and it took him another second to realize that voice had been his own. 

"Considering I'm human," the Wolf said, a strange, far away smile on her face. 

He didn't understand the remark or the distance between them. He had spoken only the truth. "What's human?" he wondered.

"Have you ever been anywhere else?"

"Never," he said. "None of us have. Our legends say we weren't allowed, and now we cannot take the risk."

"But there's something at work here," she said, and the Doctor thought she was musing, because she wasn't looking at him at all.

His underworked and overly powerful mind set her statement onto one of his trains of thought and it almost immediately arrived at a conclusion. "Ancient technology," he abruptly realized. "Because you don't speak our language most of the time, and yet we understand you completely."

The girl looked at him, and suddenly she gave him the most blinding grin, her tongue poking out through her teeth. The Doctor was thunderstruck, bewildered, amazed. He knew, just knew, that his entire life, 900 years or 900 centuries, could be lived for that smile, forever. "Dance with me," he asked.

The dance was old, and symbolic, and he didn't care. He meant it.

The Wolf's grin, if anything, got wider. "Doesn't the universe implode if you dance?" she said. 

Joy filled him, brought happiness in its wake, and suddenly, the Doctor was laughing. The silence among the Survivors was practically deafening, and he didn't even notice, just tugged at the Wolf's hands until she rose from her bench and went with him to the fire.

**

The Doctor didn't laugh. 

Even in the horror around them, even in the darkness and the fear, the hunger and the suffering, even in the face of death, all of the others laughed from time to time. The Doctor, for all that he was a grinning lunatic amidst a somber, sober crowd, never gave in to his humor that far. 

He also didn't dance. He'd been encouraged, of course, everyone was. But the Doctor's mind was strange to the rest of the Survivors, a chaotic and inspired place that they could not understand, so perhaps they encouraged him a little less than they would had he been anyone else.

At first it seemed that the Wolf was changing him. Only observation at exactly the right time revealed the actual truth of the matter.

The Wolf was making the Doctor into himself.

**

"You're him," the Wolf whispered, her head on the Doctor's chest, her body so warm he could feel her heat through his thin garments. "You're the Doctor. I've been watching you, trying to see it, but now I know it's true." She looked up and met his eyes. 

The Doctor's hearts felt like they were beating out of time as she looked so deeply into him. He wondered what she saw there, whether she knew how tired he was, how bored and sad and angry and guilty he felt. The Universe was wrong. The turn of the world felt backward and strange, his mind felt barren and unfamiliar, and the War felt like his fault. Somehow, with this alien creature glimmering up at him, it all made perfect sense. 

"You feel it, don't you?" she murmured.

The Doctor nodded helplessly and, because he didn't know what else to do, explained. "The turn of the world," he started.

"We're falling through space," the Wolf agreed. "You and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world."

The Doctor hardly dared to breathe. "And if we let go?" he wondered.

The Wolf clasped his hand tighter. "Come away with me," she said.

With both his hearts and all his mind, the Doctor agreed to it.

**

"I knew a woman once who walked all over an entire world, all so that she could tell a story. She spread that story far and wide, and one day that story became a weapon, the most powerful word that had ever been spoken.

And then it didn't happen."

This was the story the Wolf told at the fire that night. The oldest of the men seemed to understand her message, and Flavia, the wisest of the women. Brave and beautiful Romana offered to walk with her.

But the Wolf wasn't telling a story, and there was no one to tell the story to, so she had to take the word and the weapon with her.


	2. Chapter 2

The days passed and the nights as they wandered their world, searching for something they would never know until they found it. They walked hand in hand when they weren't climbing, and when the ground allowed for it, they often ran. 

Times like these, the Wolf laughed, and her laughter became the food of his soul. They both grew strong and hard-eyed and weary. Her hair grew dark at the roots and his fell to his shoulders in wild waves. They talked all the time, but the Doctor could never really explain what either of them said.

He wondered what sort of people made a woman who could fight a giant rodent for her lunch and then weep for the creature once it was defeated. He wondered if there was a universe out there that was crueler or kinder than this one. He wondered who she had lost.

When he asked questions like these, she gave him looks that reminded him of everything he had lost, and then she changed the subject to something that meant nothing. He blamed himself for this, as he blamed himself for so many things. She seemed to forgive him.

Then, there was the night she fell, and he found her hurt the next morning, and he made up his mind to go home. He was only getting in her way. It was because she had to share with him that she had gotten hurt at all, because she had been climbing trees to find them fruit.

He told her all this, unable to meet her eyes, and it was then that she seized his face in her hands, and then that she kissed him. She was fierce and made of light as her lips pressed and pulled at his own, and he had no time to be more than surprised before she pulled away from him, breathless.

She stumbled away and didn't bring it up again. She didn't even speak of it. 

**

"I don't understand you at all," he said, one morning.

"There's probably a support group for that," she allowed.

He was starting to think he might be in love.

**

One day, the sky turned blue. 

"That's not natural," the Doctor said, staring at the alien sky above his world. 

"And you failed to notice the green grass," said the Wolf, smiling and teasing. "Doctor, my Doctor... none so blind."

He smiled at her and shook his head. She had the most wonderful references, cliches from a dozen histories, bits and quotes of a million stories. "What's the rest of that one?" he wondered, kneeling to inspect the fragrant green turf. 

"You tell me," the Wolf invited, throwing down her pack beneath the outcropping of a huge, dark grey boulder. "It's logical philosophy, and your name does imply some training."

He was startled. "Does it?" he asked, genuinely surprised. "I just liked the word."

The Wolf grinned that sunrise grin of hers and shook her head. "I should have known," she observed wryly. "Oh, I so should have known."

"None so blind," he decided, "as those who keep their senses closed."

"Close," the Wolf said, leaning against the tree while the Doctor improvised their shelter for the night. "It's 'will not see.' It implies..."

"Willful ignorance," the Doctor interrupted. "Yes, I see what you mean. It seems similar, but it is much worse than those who merely hide."

"Though hiding isn't good either," she said, sadly, "unless there's nothing else you can do."

"I wish we didn't have to hide," he said. "Oh, and I figured out the sky."

"Did you?" She blinked in confusion, then shook her head at him. "Genius," she muttered, as if it was an accusation. 

The Doctor chuckled. "The soil's different. I'd heard legends about these places, but I never knew they actually existed."

"Hows that?"

"You know our people are responsible for this War..."

The Wolf tilted a hand, a gesture that the Doctor had eventually learned meant dubiousness. He shrugged a broad shoulder, offered a doubtful smile. "In the legends, it says we used to kidnap members of other species and make them play horrible games, fighting each other to the death."

Now the Wolf looked shocked, horrified, and furious. "And that caused this?" she asked, her hand describing the entire arc of the heavens.

"We don't know," the Doctor said sadly. "Could have been, though, don't you think?"

For the first time since they'd left the camp, the Wolf looked truly uncertain. "I... I don't know," she admitted. Then, squaring her shoulders, she took a deep breath and then rushed into, "But that's not what's important now. What's important now is finding what is still functioning to make this world as stable as it is and, if possible, use it to correct this situation, because it is wrong, no two ways about that, and I can't..."

The Doctor laughed. He couldn't help it. She'd been babbling at a high velocity, her tone full of distractions and secrets, and the Doctor felt like he should know that technique from somewhere. 

The Wolf gave him an indignant glare, and then poked him until he finally apologized - as much as he knew how - for laughing at her. (What he said was, "I'm sorry you didn't get the joke," and what she said was, "So like you," in an attractive mock disgust. The Doctor was sure he was besotted.)

"Anyway, the legends also said that no alien was allowed to set foot on our soil. So, if we really did have the kind of power to do all that, maybe we also had the power to move the sheer volume of alien soil here, enough to effect the base elements that get thrown into the sky, overriding our red grass and gold water with green grass and green water, and thus this teal blue sky."

The Wolf just stared at him. "You're brilliant," she said, shaking her head. "It's completely disturbing, really. You've had less education than me in this Universe, and you're still completely brilliant."

"I have a lot of time to think," he admitted, proud and attempting modesty and almost sure she was really right.

She gave him a grin with her tongue poking out through her teeth. The Doctor wondered if she had any idea how attractive that was. "Maybe we'll find new ways to occupy your mind in the future," she said.

Yes, she knew.

**

"It's alien," he said, awed and ecstatic, when the Wolf handed him a berry she'd plucked from a low growing icy-colored shrub. 

"Won't kill you," she promised. "Can't say that of everything around here, but these are fine."

"No, but they're wonderful, don't you see? I've never seen anything truly alien before."

"What about me?" she asked.

He didn't even have to think. "You're one of us," he said, waving her concern away with a flip of his large hand. "But this, this is..." He grinned at her. "This is fantastic!" he said.

She flung her arms around him and sobbed into his chest. The only words he could definitely make out were, "I miss you so much!"

**

The Doctor didn't know to be suspicious of the blue green land in the middle of their red gold world. He saw no reason, no necessity. Their world had long been the only thing protecting them from unparalleled horror, and ultimate destruction, and he was used to trusting the stingy soil and murky sky. It didn't occur to him that there was more than just color differences in this verdant, fertile land.

The second morning, they camped out next to a shining clear pond. The Wolf had promised to help him refill their water supplies later in the day, but he was rather craving the clear, fresh water as she collapsed on the grass and claimed she never wanted to move again.

He couldn't blame her. It seemed her species was more susceptible to exhaustion, just as his was far more susceptible to dehydration. The water looked and smelled clean, and the plants around it were bright and healthy. He plucked and dropped a blade of grass into the water, and watched it for several long, wary moments.

Satisfied and certain, the Doctor at last dipped one hand into the water, scooping up a cool, clear mouthful.

**

He was vaguely aware of murmured words, things like sedative and stubborn and seepeyare and time and lord, but none of them made any more sense than any of them. Doctor made a little more sense, the attractive syllables that described a clever person, a different one. Bypass didn't fit anything at all and he didn't think he'd ever heard the word respiratory before.

What registered at last was something that felt an awful lot like the Wolf's lips on his. She'd only kissed him that one time, mostly just flirted outrageously and otherwise made him wonder if he'd just imagined the kiss, dreamed the whole thing up.

One thing was certain: the heat of her mouth was indeed unbelievable. He gasped and tried to focus, to memorize the sensation this time.

She pulled away from him immediately, eyes alight and hands fluttering from his chest to his face. "You're alive!" she said, and one of her hands hastily brushed tears from her face. 

"Is that what this is?" he wondered, confused and uncertain as to how he'd come to be in the position he was in, and what he was meant to do about it.

"That's what they call it, yeah," the Wolf murmured playfully.

"I'm alive!" he exclaimed with a grin that felt like glowing.

"Saved your life with a kiss," she murmured. "Who'd've thought?"

**

That night, they did not move on. The Doctor, grateful for the respite, decided to stay in his bedding and enjoy the extra rest. After awhile, though, boredom set in, so he started to talk to the Wolf, only to realize she wasn't there.

He got up and went looking for her, finding her sitting on a rock above the pool, like a curious predator, a hazy thing of mist and miracles as she gazed between the trap and the moons. "I find that when I talk to myself," the Doctor began, "people stare at me as if I'm mad." He scrambled up on the Wolf's rock, longing in every fiber of his being. 

"What's completely interesting about that," he said, when she didn't offer any rejoinder, "is that I'm still being stared at when I'm talking to myself because there's no one there. What do you think of that?"

"Yes, you are mad," she said, smiling faintly, watching the sky.

"I love you," he said.

"Completely mad," she added.

"Completely," he agreed.

"I'll be down in a little while," she promised.

Dismissed, the Doctor lowered himself from her rock. Perhaps she'd not heard him. Perhaps she didn't know the word.

It hurt to think it, either way.

**

He was dozing lightly when she crawled into his makeshift bed with him, her eyes over-bright and flashing in the pale moonlight. "If this is a mistake," she said, her voice almost too quiet to hear, "if I'm presuming too much, just tell me, and it'll never come up again."

Breathless with wonder, with fear, with desire, he met her eyes, not knowing what he should say. He opened his mouth, but the words wouldn't come this time, no words would.

For the Doctor, that in itself made the whole event extraordinary. Then, he realized there was nothing between them but the loose robe he slept in. He could see more of the Wolf by moonlight tonight than he had ever seen of her, ever.

He pulled the coverings away so he could look at the rest of her, discover her completely now that she was removing the borders. "I don't know what to say," he managed at last when he noticed the hesitant look in her eyes.

She smiled slowly. "I don't either," she admitted gently.

They stared at each other for long moments, and then the Wolf reached out and cupped his face, her hands hot and gentle, the turmoil he normally felt when he touched her quite still. She wanted this, was certain she did.

The Doctor didn't know if it was only for tonight or forever, but she wanted him back at last and he didn't have the strength or the courage to argue. His protest of, "I don't want to hurt you," however, was not a mere token.

"I'm not a virgin," she said, her cheeks pink and her eyes sad. "I'm sorry, but I'm not."

He'd known that, or at least suspected it. He wasn't sure how it worked, just that he knew things about her that he believed and understood. "I know, but..."

"Shhh," she whispered, and reinforced their stillness with a kiss.

**

Tender kisses he could manage, soft and slow and full of possibilities. Touching and being touched was easier then, their dirty, work-roughened hands leaving damp, dark trails across pale skin that had never before seen even the light of the moons.

She led the way through the darkness, as she had so many nights before this, not with her harsh light this time, but with her soft edges and her dark, bright eyes. He followed her, willingly but warily, unafraid of what he did not know, but terrified for what she might not understand.

Clumsy caresses and tentative ones lead to calmer, surer ones. Kisses became deeper, more intent. Everything blended into the night, sounds and sensations, heat and beauty and ecstatic confusion. They turned and twisted and writhed together, reaching for more, always more, always higher.

He felt like he'd never been warm before in his entire life. She was so hot - boiling - and as she shivered above him, he felt his blood slowly heating to match her. Her breath was gaspy and punctuated with tiny, high pitched cries, and he had never been so alive or so afraid. 

The Wolf was a wild and free thing, something he could never claim, and he fought the urge like he fought off the end of this. She fit him so perfectly, from the way her tiny hands nestled inside his huge ones to the way he found himself fully sheathed inside her. She rode him carefully, her muscles taut and straining, and it was all he could do to hold on to her and on to this. He wanted the moment to last forever, wanted to be with her, within her, forever.

"I love you," he whispered against her bared throat. He bit his lip, refusing to give in to the temptation.

"I know," she whispered. "My Doctor. I've always known."

It was all spiraling out of his control, and he couldn't hang onto everything, not everything at once. Her rhythm was relentless, and the colliding needs rode higher. "I can't..." he begged her, not even sure what he was trying to say.

"Shh," she whispered, "I know."

"But, I want..." This wasn't supposed to be just about him, was it? He didn't want that, he was sure, but oh, he just needed, just the release, he couldn't keep her and he couldn't touch her mind and he couldn't even give her his name, but he could... couldn't. "I think..."

"Yes," she said. "It's okay."

He couldn't breathe. The power that had been building tightened to a steady, demanding, insistent... just need. "But you..."

She gave him a smile that took him, mind, body and soul, that made him hers, forever. "Next time," she said, and with such wicked, aching promise.

It drove him over the edge. He toppled and tumbled and spiraled in the most perfect moment of sensation he could remember in his entire life, a single instant of absolute bliss. He fell back into himself just in time to watch her finish, to watch her face as she shuddered and clung to him and clenched around him so tight it was nearly painful in the blinding ecstacy.

Maybe they had nothing else in any Universe, but from this moment on, the Doctor was convinced that they would have each other.

**

"I love you," he whispered, into the aftermath of the storm. Covered in a fine layer of sweat and sex, watching their bodies glisten in the moonlight, the Doctor wanted nothing more than to stay like this forever. Even if he had to sacrifice that orange sky and live forever under the blue one instead, he would give up everything to live within her like this.

"Quite right, too," she answered, her voice sounding happy and amused.

It hurt, though. She probably hadn't meant it to hurt, but it felt like he'd ripped one of his hearts from his chest for her only to have her pronounce it messy. "What?" he breathed.

The Wolf was silent for a very long time, so long that the Doctor began to wonder if she'd gone away into sleep. Finally, her voice split the moon-kissed darkness with an angry, annoyed sound.

"What is it?" he asked again, preparing himself to forgive her even this.

It was such a bitter, desperate, heart-wrenching sound that he couldn't help but reach for her, when she explained, "I'm turning into you."


	3. Chapter 3

Living under their ancient sun, the Wolf became a golden thing of sharp lines and fading colors. The Doctor began to suspect that the light loved her as much as he did, for it was always upon her, sunlight gilding her darkened hair a thousand perfect shades of gold, starlight forever haunting her night dark eyes, moonlight melding her lines and shadows, rendering her ethereal, divine.

His intellect told him, from a strictly factual point of view, that he was exaggerating her in his mind. All the same, he couldn't escape it. He could calculate the weight of the world at any given time, give the exact figures for how much food needed to be stored to ensure every member of their group survived the winters. He could explain any anomaly, answer any question, even give detailed accounts on the progress of They Who Destroy simply by observing the night sky and the damage done there. He could keep his mind occupied with every single thing that could be thought in this crumbling reality of theirs, and he would still return to his lover, like the spring returning to the world. 

If he'd thought having her would help, he'd been mistaken. In a way it made it worse, because it gave him facts to dwell on. He could spend hours musing on the shape and heft of her small, pert breasts, the pearling of her sweet, dusky rose nipples under the touch of his hands or his lips. He could contemplate every single response she had ever had to his kiss. He could focus on the gorgeous noises she made, or the sounds she made him make, and how each and every noise had been caused. He could analyze in intricate detail every single possible variation of every step of the journey from her invitation to her orgasm.

If he let himself linger there for too long, he would end up wanting to knock her down and take her hard, where ever they happened to be. He'd never given in to the impulse, despite the wholly instinctive drive that he fought whenever she came to him. He couldn't come to her if he couldn't claim her, and he couldn't claim her because she wouldn't claim him.

As they traveled, the Doctor came to wonder if they might be, truly, the only thing real left. He could still sense the Survivors, and they could still sense him sometimes. Romana had had her baby - a daughter, a truly blessed event. Two of the men were claiming the child and Romana didn't seem to have the hearts to deny either of them. Old Azmael had lain down one night last moon, and would never rise again. Young Allrand had managed to repair the irrigation system the Doctor had devised, and the boy was currently studying to see what improvements could be made.

But their world began to seem like a distant, untouchable thing. He was a traveler now, the one they knew but did not understand, if they ever had. He began to doubt that more and more, odd half-memories ebbing and flowing over his mind, image-idea-concepts, of times and places that he could not have seen, that could not possibly exist. And always, always, there was the longing, the reaching, the wanting and needing and missing something that he couldn't touch, that he only ever felt like he knew or had when his tiny, reckless Wolf lay sleeping in his arms.

**

_The shoreline is murky and faded, cold and hung with sorrow, mist, and shadows. The constant wind cannot lift them. Stones rise, bleached and cracked and eroded, from the sand, silent sentinels that perpetually await the water's return. The sky is grey, like burnished steel, the clouds so thick in the oncoming storm that the sun cannot seem to touch those ancient markers. They wait like anxious grief in quiet eyes, and there on the strands of her bay, the Wolf waits as well, waits forever._

_He comes to her, but not for her, not in the sense that he can ever take her away from here. Some day, he may break her heart here, shatter it like glass in an attempt to hand it back from across the Universe Divide. Some day, he may stand here instead, and hand her his last wish, his two wishes, so indivisible in his hearts that they cannot be reconciled, not even in the perfect imperfect mirror he offers her._

_The truth that even she can't bear is that this shore is always there, this bay, this water, these stones, this sand. The knowledge that bows even him is that the choice that goes with it is also always waiting._

_In a million billion times and places, they lurk, different shapes, different sizes, different worlds. But always they are there; the same force that made them always makes them, and always, always, there is an empty beach, a lowering sky, and a beloved, and the burdensome weight of all the unspoken._

_And always, there is a bad Wolf._

**

"We'll have to build something bigger than a raft here," the Wolf mused.

The Doctor stared at her, watching the way her hair whipped in the wind, caught on her face, and was pushed away. He knew he should be looking out at the ocean, the tumultuous, glass clear, gold water, that problem in all it's sun washed glory. It was just like the sea beyond where the Survivors made camp and home, so he could only guess that this must be the Eastern shore of the self-same continent.

The Doctor couldn't consider it at all, though, for the Wolf tilted her face toward the morning sun, ethereal and pale against the shining black sand. Her dark eyes were bright in that strange light, and streaming with tears. "It's a little too familiar," she whispered.

He would never be able to explain how it happened that he was kissing her the next moment, simply that he was. The Wolf's bright smile when he pulled back to apologize for the sheer rudeness of such a forward gesture allowed him to think (such as he was) that it was all right with her.

He kissed her deeply, all tempest and desperation, fear and winter in the press of his lips, in the slide and thrust of his tongue inside her. She answered him, compassion and hunger in her every response. One hand tangled in her hair, cradling her head, the other wandered to draw her closer, ever closer. 

He had never dared be so presumptuous, had never imagined he was capable of it. He'd never dared touch her in the light of day, never slid his large hand between her strong, soft-skinned thighs to touch that sweet, slippery heat, as he did now, as she whimpered about against his lips. The Doctor had never even considered this, not as a real possibility, but his lover had a hand on his now, guiding the motion as her hips rocked hard and steady against him. 

The Wolf's teeth were sharp as she nipped at his lips. She smoothed away each small hurt with a tiny lick, and the Doctor found himself moaning in response every time. His mind meandered down the most delicious path and he found himself wondering. Even as he thrust a large finger inside her, felt her quivering with hot anticipation, even as he drew away from her lips to watch her face, her wild eyes, his mind still raced. He did this to her. He did it.

The Wolf keened suddenly, stiffened against him, her body bow-string taut, her muscles clenching against his hand. The Doctor feasted his eyes on her beauty, on the way her mouth fell open, the heaving of her chest as she gasped for breath. He did this. She was like this, pleasure drunk and weak-kneed, because of him.

He drew his hand away from her, absolutely fascinated with his fingers coated with her slick juices. He'd always been curious, so those fingers went into his mouth. She tasted like herself, all spice and heat and... She was also watching him. The Doctor paused in his analysis to meet the Wolf's dancing eyes, his finger poised on his bottom lip, his tongue tip just out to touch it.

"It's like..." she said, softly. "You're different, but you never change." She didn't explain herself further, just slid her heavy garments from her shoulders and let them fall to the sand between them. Then, she dropped to her knees on her clothes, and finally released his gaze to start toying with his clothes.

The Doctor froze, shock and erotic fascination warring for a place within him. "Wolf, love..." She trailed tiny, burning kisses across his thighs, pushing his robe open as she went. "Wolf, what..."

"Rose," she said.

The Doctor's brain wasn't exactly functioning at that moment, so he wasn't sure what the word meant. "What?"

"Rose," she repeated. "My name. It's Rose."

"Rose..." He started to repeat, but at that exact moment, her wet little tongue took a quick, hot swipe at the base of his penis. So her name came out with a very long hiss on the end of it, and was punctuated with a sound that might have been a whimper at the loss the instant the sensation ended. 

He stared down at her, and she gazed back up at him, dark eyes doing a merry dance of mischief as he considered her. He shook his head in disbelief. "Rose." It felt nice, felt beautiful, reminded him of flowers.

"Yes, Doctor." She grinned. "Rose."

He grinned back, unable to resist. "Nice to meet you, Rose," he said.

She very definitely rolled her eyes at him. "You're incorrigible," she said.

"You're beautiful," he answered. She sort of had him at her mercy at that moment, after all, and anyway, it was the simple truth.

She laughed and surprised him again, leaning forward to take another intimate swipe at him with that teasing pink tongue. "You're too tall," she complained, her tone as playful as her laughing eyes. 

He should, he really should, get back on the topic of their travels, concentrate on the ocean that was definitely in their way. He should. He dropped to his knees instead, in love, laughing, alive. 

"We do have work to do," his lover pointed out. The Doctor was about to at least consider agreeing with her when she rose up on her knees and bent her head over him, taking him into her mouth.

Already aroused, he hardened fully in an instant under her tender assault. The whole world narrowed down to his Wolf, his Rose, and what she was doing to him. Tiny, hot hands cupped his testicles, fisted his length, while she took what she could of him into her warm, wet mouth. She sucked him hard, stroked him tight, and if he hadn't already been on his knees, he would have fallen. 

There was a part of him that couldn't believe this was happening. The rest of him had a ready response, and those tiny hands that had been pleasing him suddenly became clamps on his thighs to hold him in place. She broke off to meet his eyes, the soft look in them enough to make him tremble (more). "Careful," she said, watching him until the Doctor felt like he'd regained some semblance of control and nodded.

As soon as that happened, she was back to touching him, first with long wet licks to the head, and then along the length. When at last she sucked him back into her mouth, he was shaking, gasping, willing to plead with her for relief or release, ready to push her down in the sand and take her right there. He felt young and naive and more alive than he had ever been as she found a rhythm that rendered him incoherent. 

His body burned hot all over and his testicles tightened almost painfully. The muttered protest that he delivered to Rose was met only with redoubled efforts. He whimpered, clutched at control. She dug fingernails into his backside and took him deeper.

The moment of his release was blinding, the erotic bliss glorious and strange. She drank every drop and left him weak and spent, shaken, and clinging to her. They tumbled into the soft black sand, and she kissed him again, at last.

The taste of himself on her lips was like understanding. It was finally right, all of this, it finally made sense. Their flavors combined on his tongue, within him, and the Doctor knew what rightness tasted like. "Rose," he whispered, against her lips, just to learn the savor of that word, as well, just to know what it should be like. She nodded and nuzzled his cheek with her nose. 

His brain cam back on just like flipping a switch, and the confusion set in. "Why now?" he wondered.

"Hum?" Rose asked. 

"Why did you give me your name, now?"

She wriggled around. "You came to me," she said simply.

So it was a matter of trust. Perhaps it was always a matter of trust. "I..." He took a deep breath, but the word wouldn't come. "I can't offer you the same. Not yet." He didn't add "Maybe not ever" but it was true. There was something odd about his given name, something wrong and inviolate. 

"It's all right," Rose said. "You don't have to." She turned her head, settled it against his shoulder. "Damn sand," she complained, "gets into everything."

Before he knew it, she was asleep.

**

_In your time, there will be a War, and it will be the end of everything, unless you act. Unless you always have acted, unless you are the act; everything that is, was, and ever could be, is dead._

_Choose, therefore, and save all that is, was, and could be. Choose and live and live to die._

_In your choice, you will take your rank, your due, your mark, and you will fight. In the End, always in the End, the Key will have been in your hands, and the Lock will be yours to turn. It will always have been given to you, and you alone will have the Moment._

_You will walk away in solitude, and close the door of the broken, burning half of Eternity behind you. You will be more alone than you have ever been, and you will have always been the most lonely creature in all creation._

_You will pass on a million things, before this and after, and everything that you have and are will scatter like seeds upon the Winds of Time. You will give some of you into everything, but there are two things you hold forever, until you pass them on in a kiss that is love and death and eternity at once._

_No one will ever remember the War. Some will forget the enemies, and more will forget the ones who fought them, the ones who gave you life. In time, even you will be all but forgotten._

_But the mark will stay upon you forever._


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Includes some quotes from Series 1 & 2 of Doctor Who (2005)

"What's this?" the Doctor asked of his drowsy, comfortable lover. His fingers traced the mark on her shoulder, the design not clear from this angle, but already causing tingles of screaming familiarity.

"Hum?" Rose murmured. "Oh, I forgot." She sat up immediately, turning away from him and tugging at her coat, which was wedged firmly beneath him.

"Rose," he said, sternly. "Rose, what is that mark?" He hadn't seen it clearly yet, but his suspicions were tightening. It could explain why he didn't dare claim her: inside, he'd always known she belonged to someone.

Rose sighed. "There was a War," she whispered.

"Is there anything else?" the Doctor asked, genuinely curious. What did one do with a life that wasn't spent struggling for every scrap and drip of bare survival a blasted rock could manage?

"Yes!" Rose insisted fervently, her bright eyes earnest and determined as she turned them on him. "Oh, yes, Doctor, so much more." She sighed and looked away, plucking up a small handful of soft black sand and allowing it to slide through her fingers. "I was born on a small blue planet on the other side of this galaxy, in another Universe that had one thing this one didn't. Trouble is, I don't know what that one thing was - though I do have some nasty suspicions."

The Doctor sat up at last and shifted in the sand to make himself more comfortable, and to allow Rose to retrieve her coat. She didn't bother, which made him smile as he watched the high-risen sun admire her bare skin. No amount of shining on Rose's part, however, could stop the whirlwind brilliance of his mind in its headlong flight to knowledge.

"There's a single first cause," he said, voice thick with awe. Inspiration led to intuition led to blinding flashes of inexplicable knowledge. "Every Universe has to be a derivative of an ultimate... superstructure. A layered multi-verse, with every causative possibility spawning an alternative reality, similar to the former, but diverging from a single nexus like ripples in a pond." The Doctor gasped as he realized what he was detailing out, suggesting. Infinity piled on infinity - a poly-dimensional hyper-construct, with as many Universes per glimpse as there were atoms in a single drop of rain. "Micro to macro," he said. "Everything is a smaller example of everything else."

Rose nodded miserably. "That's what you said once. Well, the last of it. The rest... that I'm not sure I get. But it's all separated by the Void." She shook her head.

"That type of space has to be extant as well. If every Universe reaches a heat death, then there has to be a space to both cause and contain. It would have to be infinite - truly infinite, not just by mortal understanding. It has to be a... negative space, so vast that no physics can possibly apply. Reality is impossible there, the very definition of the word..."

The Wolf shot a glance out at the ocean. "Impossible," she mused. The Doctor reached to draw her attention back to the here and now, and she shook herself, smiling wanly at him. "My definitions have expanded a bit over the years. When I first... left home... forever was the time it was going to take me to pass my next birthday, and maybe be an adult to my mum at last."

The Doctor smiled. Borusa still tried to baby him, and all the man had done was found him, not even sired him. "Parents can be like that. How did it work out?"

"Long story. But that's where we're going here, so yeah. I learned. Forever was how long I was gonna stay with him - about two years, as it turned out."

"Him? Your lover, the one you lost." The Doctor frowned. "He haunts you, I guess?"

"It isn't like that." Rose reached up and touched his face. "He was in a War, and that War... his people changed their faces. You're familiar with that, yeah?"

The Doctor nodded. They'd always assumed it had something to do with the way their planet disappeared, the way a few of the Survivors still seemed to hang around even though their bodies had been burned. No one had any way to understand it, really, not without something to make the analysis with, not without something to analyze.

"Well, they were in the thick of the War, and they had to identify the bodies. So they marked them, a mark that stayed, no matter what. He had it on his shoulder. I saw it more than once."

"And you're wearing that mark? This man's mark? He put it on you?"

"He was the only survivor, Doctor," she said softly, insistently. "Everyone else died, and he was so alone. I did a lot to let him know he wasn't alone. But this?" Rose reached her arms up and lifted her long, multi-toned hair from her back. "This I put there so I wouldn't be alone." 

She turned her back to him, baring her shoulders and revealing to his frightened, curious eyes a strange miracle. "It's as close a match as I could manage."

"But this says..." It was in the formal language, a stylized spiral that described in its curves and bends and colors an entire concept history, an ornate story. He barely knew the language anymore, and didn't think anyone else could possibly remember more than he did. Nevertheless, this symbol was inescapable, its simple appearance hiding the variety of it, the uniqueness of each presentation. 

What looked like a slightly stylized infinity symbol was, in fact, an Omniscate, a pictogram device that everyone, regardless, shielded his or her identity inside, even while allowing the colors, curls, and spirals tell the story. The important details, the parts that made each person who he was to the Survivors, were always visible in between the lines that sometimes microlettered out an unused name.

This one, the one Rose wore, was special. It mentioned a wanderer and hinted at a renegade, suggested a leader, and gossiped a general. It muttered houseless and unknown, murmured about hidden names and unchosen faces. It whispered things (wanderer, traveler, meddler, vagabond) that were strange, but more things (genius, changeling, special, enigma) that were completely familiar. It hid, as so many of these did, a single name, and it had been more than a lifetime since the Doctor had seen it written down. The word itself was far more familiar than the complex story woven around it in careful threads and curls on Rose's shoulder.

He had only considered his fears when he considered why he couldn't claim her. He had never seen this, never known it was here, but maybe he had instinctively always known. She always spoke of a strange past, even stranger than his, than anyone's he knew. She had never been his in the light of day before, but it was wholly clear now. Instinct had known what knowledge couldn't comprehend. There was already a man's name on Rose's body, a mate she had claimed of her own free will. 

It was his name, and the Doctor had never been more confused in his life.

Then, his Rose kissed him, kissed him as his, and it wasn't so confusing after all.

**

Claimed and bound at last, they sleep beneath the waning light of a battered star, while War without end rages above them. But forces are moving, ever moving, in the darkness that cannot exist; and in the non-places where things that aren't happening collide with things that won't, something is building.

In their destroyed un-histories, legends remain. One word is there, is always there, one ancient threat that quails even the unstoppable forces of an insurmountable horde.

In the four destroyed corners of a Universe where even Causation is broken, something eldritch and strange howls in the wilderness. In the winds of time, a storm stirs.

**

"I always thought this place had two suns," Rose observed as they meandered along the shore, the comment and her expression both apropos of nothing he could understand. It was as if she was looking into another time, and the Doctor was surprised to see the cloud of glory that always trailed her shift under the force of her gaze.

For himself, he considered the sky, looking at the oddly grey-green color where the native orange was met by the alien blue that the Wolf said was more familiar to her. In his mind, he could see, not the rising suns, but the distant mountain they rose over. Instead of the simple, snow dusted peaks, he remembered, just as clearly as if it were a real memory, a dark, tall, strange tower, a jagged black rip through the white morning mist. Every hour on the hour, a chime once cried a mournful dirge to the breathless world around it, abandoned of all life higher than a tree. 

This whole alien land they had just crossed, with its small traps and its strange flora, was supposed to be part of that, taken by the Tower and the terrible Game that went with it. The Doctor turned then, and looked directly away from the mountains, toward the spine of the continent, where the two parallel ranges changed their paths and collided a second time.

"We don't need to leave here," he said, something like memory flashing in his mind's eye. "There's our destination, the fertile basin of those two peaks. There's a sheltered valley..."

Rose considered the mountains carefully, her dark eyes still somewhen else. When she spoke, her voice was low and rhythmic, her speech recitative and precise. She was quoting, something or someone, that she'd heard before, heard enough to memorize like poetry. "...The spine of the continent of Wild Endeavor, and there in the cradle of the mountains of Solace and Solitude, stood the Citadel of the Time Lords, a vast dome as clear as glass..."

He could almost see the world she was describing, rolling fertile fields of red grass that went on and on forever, towering ancient villas hewn from the very rocks, carved and cut and chiseled into immovable exactitude, larger on the inside from ages and ages of technological marvels. Trees of silver rose and rose forever to hold the orange sky on their shining bows, turning to living forests of flame under the rising second sun. 

That forest, that dome, those wind-whipped blades of wild grass, all that was supposed to be there. He could see it so clearly. It felt as if the real image before them had been poorly superimposed over the older, brighter image. Quite apart from the inspiration of his genius which gave him inexplicable bursts of knowledge, the world where that Citadel stood tall and ever shining was something he could see in a different, but very clear way.

It felt as if the knowledge he had always carried - that the Universe was wrong - had just collided painfully with the knowledge that there was a right Universe, somewhere. He could see what should be: right before his eyes, it was coalescing from a cloud of golden mist possibilities, like the ones that trailed the Wolf everywhere she went. And there was a reason why he knew all this, a reason Rose had just said, a reason that tied all this madness together. He couldn't explain it, not yet, but there was someone who could.

Holding tight to Rose's hand, the Doctor asked, "What's a Time Lord?"

**

_"...We're falling through space, you and me, and if we let go... That's who I am..."_

_"...Your history could be rewritten, just like that..."_

_"...look at me, I'm stupid..."_

_"...my people had laws about this. We could have prevented this..."_

_"...Who says I'm not - red bicycle when you were twelve - Ask me anything, I'm on fire..."_

_"...your legends called me the Oncoming Storm..."_

_"...No second chances. I'm that sort of man..."_

_"...I'm the Doctor, and I cured them..."_

_"...You can spend the rest of your life with me, but I can't spend the rest of my life with you. That's the curse of the Time Lords..."_

_"...the stuff of legends..."_

_"...Ten million Cybermen, no problem. Just one Doctor? Now you're scared..."_

**

"Time's not a straight line," Rose said. "It's not fixed."

"Of course it isn't," the Doctor said, blinking at her in confusion.

She shook her head. "Oh, of course, you've lived it all your life." She reached up and touched his face. "It's like..." Shrugging, she snatched up her pack again. "Let's walk. We can't stay here, we'll run out of water."

The Doctor nodded and held out a hand, which Rose accepted blithely. They walked together, the Wolf occasionally looking back over her shoulder and smiling mysteriously at their footprints. "What about time?" the Doctor asked after awhile of being bewildered by this.

"For most people in most universes, time only goes in one direction."

The Doctor chuffed. "That's certainly not the case here," he said, knowing even his expressive face couldn't fully explain the extent of his disgust at that fact. "Three of the species of They Who Destroy have been fighting this war since before their suns were born, in space that can no longer physically or geographically support them." 

"Exactly. And we need to find out how they've managed that. Because it's impossible."

The Doctor snickered, this time. "You can't call something impossible if it's actually happening, you know."

"You should so talk!" The Wolf laughed, her twinkling, starlight laugh, and hugged the Doctor's side, and he believed it with faith beyond certainty that he would have loved her in any Universe. 

Only when she'd stopped laughing, she wasn't happily amused. She was serious as death, again, more final than any pyre. "You remember earlier, when we were talking about how definitions change?"

The Doctor nodded. "Yeah," he said, smiling to himself to realize he was picking up her idiom.

"The biggest one's 'impossible'." Her eyes seemed to catch a sun gold fire. "'Cuz impossible? That's the word that means absolutely nothing to me. Not anymore."


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem cited in this chapter is from "The Hollow Men" by TS Elliot

With a true goal before them, the miles seemed to get longer, the hidden valley farther away than it had been the first time they named it. They stopped traveling at night as they reached the old growth silver forest, finding the risks of breaking bones in the shadowed dark to far outweigh their chances of finding anything alive and harmful. 

The Wolf's electric light died about that same time. It took the Doctor several days to bypass its original power source and build it a tiny motor that ran on kinetic energy instead. 

"Better, too," he said with amusement.

"'Til the lightbulb goes out," Rose agreed happily, shaking the little torch. "Do they even teach jiggery pokery here?"

The Doctor chuckled. "Sure," he said. "I came first in jiggery pokery. You?"

Her eyes were over bright when she laughed and said, "Aced Hullabaloo this time. You'll have to teach me."

**

_Between the idea_  
And the reality  
Between the motion  
And the act  
Falls the Shadow 

_Between the conception_  
And the creation  
Between the emotion  
And the response  
Falls the Shadow 

_Between the desire_  
And the spasm  
Between the potency  
And the existence  
Between the essence  
And the descent  
Falls the Shadow 

_...This is the way the world ends_  
Not with a bang but a whimper.  


**

"How did this happen?" the Doctor demanded one morning. There was a reason he was so angry, so bitter. This morning, he and Rose had literally tripped over a body. 

"Sontaran," the Doctor had explained, "one of They Who Destroy."

It was the Wolf, however, who insisted they dig the hapless brute a grave. The World had stingy soil, blasted and weak and unwilling to support vegetation in many places. It was also thin and sandy, loose and crumbled. Even in the forest clearing, they were only able to dig a shallow hole, but there was more than ample rock to deal with the rest. 

The Doctor slumped now against a gnarled silver tree as far as Rose's smaller size and different nature had let them walk from the new grave before she succumbed to weariness and some emotion that had been effecting her all day. Rose was leaning on the other side, her breath sounding labored. "What's it doing here of all places: how did it find here and what would it want with here anyway?"

"And why's it so big?" Rose added, her tone even more confused than his own.

"What?" To the Doctor at least, any Sontaran was decidedly short, and squat as well. They were dense and bulky and inexorable, their combat advantage, just as the others all had distinct physical advantages. 

"I've seen these things before," Rose admitted. "They're a warrior race, impervious to most weapons, and to reason of course. But they were smaller than me when I met them."

"They're a clone species," the Doctor supplied. "So they could, technically, modify the clone stock to a smaller size if it was to their advantage, say for using fewer supplies. Suppose their constant war mongering hasn't gone badly for them ever in this Universe."

"Suppose," Rose agreed, sadly. Her eyes tilted up to the sky. "You look at it up there, all peaceful, and it never occurs to you that there's this dirty great war going on. How do you even know about it?"

"Well, you've seen them, at night," the Doctor reminded her. "We studied what we saw. The stars go out, and come back on, wrecked spaceships fall out of the sky, or burn in perfect orbits. Some of the eldest remember a not-past where we fought in the war. Some remember an even older not-past where there was no war."

"That's sort of what I remember," Rose agreed softly. She stared up at the sky. "Never thought I'd ever get to see your world, Doctor, never mind get to live here."

"You belong here, with us, with me," the Doctor insisted, pulling her into his arms to emphasize. "This is your world, too, now."

Rose smiled a bright, whimsical, winning smile. "S'been a long time since I had a world," she said. 

Having no idea what he could possibly say about that, the Doctor decided to kiss her instead. She kissed him back to ward off the winter, her mouth fiercely possessive and blazing. He matched her, a deep groan caught in the back of his throat as her fingers tangled themselves in his wild mane of curls.

He took control of their kiss by cradling the back of her head in his large hand, guiding her subtly with lips and fingertips, and then not so subtly at all. His other hand dropped to cup one of Rose's breasts, finding the little peak already taut as he roughed his thumb over the cloth covering her. Rose whimpered and tore her mouth from him, just long enough to capture a shocked, gasping breath. She immediately flung herself back at him, her lips and tongue and sharp little teeth devouring him.

Her tiny hands started to trace his body, and he lost no time tearing open her clothes and then his to get more contact between them. She was so small, the top of her head on a level with his chest if he stood at full height. It was impossible, absurd, and yet they fit together so beautifully well. The Doctor never ceased to be amazed by his wolfish Rose, her wild tendencies and her tender - she had only one - heart. 

He pushed her up against a tree, the branches low and well spread, if completely awkward. Rose gave not a word of protest, just dragged her nails down his back and over his sides. He yelped because he was ticklish, which made her grin like the lupine creature she really was and dig those claws in again. The Doctor shoved her into the cradle of the branches, and bent to catch one of her nipples in his teeth in a mild punishment.

Rose hissed and swore viciously and, wonder of wonders, thrust her shoulders back, tilting toward him, apparently appreciating the little pain. She clung to the branches supporting her, spread her legs wide, and practically snarled at him. 

Feral need and a driving ache filled him, and the Doctor filled Rose, buried himself inside her without so much as a pause for thought. She gasped with his penetration, and he froze in shock, in near terror. Pulling back to look at her, begging her silently to be unhurt, the Doctor studied Rose's face for signs of pain. 

She looked aroused and disheveled and beautifully flushed. If there was any pain, she gave no indication, slowly starting to rock her hips against him, her movements slow and shaky in this awkward position. "Rose?" he whispered.

She whimpered. "Doctor." She pushed toward him more sharply this time, her tightness clutching at him, hot and quivering. He suspected the tree was uncomfortable. He suspected she didn't care.

His hands slid between her body and their clothes, cupping her bum and adjusting her position a little, trying to keep from hurting her. She felt so good, and every single movement felt nearly unbearably sweet.

"Please," she whimpered. "Oh, please, it's so good." 

She was so tight at this odd angle; the heat of her warmer body was nearly overwhelming. He rocked against her, slipping only a few inches, the friction and the warmth and the wonder of it all building to an impossibly rapid crescendo behind eyelids he couldn't even remember closing. "Rose," he whispered, in perfect time to their movements, his hands tightening and loosening on her bum as he pulled her onto him, again and again and again. "Rose, my girl, my Rose, my Wolf, my love, my precious, precious girl. Rose..." 

Her breath caught, her posture stiffened. "Doctor," she called. Hearing his name, like that, a plea, a prayer... She trembled, shook, and then cried out, a rough, ecstatic thrill of a noise.

Her slick heat clenched and clutched around him, muscles pulsing and shivering and drawing him in. He slid home inside her, once, twice more, and then she nipped at his shoulder, and he was lost, claimed, hers, Rose's. His whole body shuddered as he spent himself within her, the feeling like fire and freedom.

It took them some time to come down from the shaking high, tumbled haphazardly to the ground with their tiny collection of possessions strewn around them. They lay wrapped around each other, entangled like clinging vines, and trading calming kisses as their hearts slowed to something like normal.

"That was amazing," Rose said, sounding a little shocked still as she placed a tiny kiss on the Doctor's chest. Her cheeks colored a bit more brightly than the lovely sexual flush that was just fading, and the Doctor chuckled.

"What is it?" he asked, knowing something had struck her, whether it was modesty or bewilderment.

"I dunno what came over me," she admitted softly. "I'm not... you know, like that."

"Neither am I!" he exclaimed with amused indignation. 

Rose snickered. "Dunno," she said. She looked away, then mumbled, "You could, though."

"What's that?" the Doctor asked, reaching to tilt her chin.

Rose took a deep breath, then met his eyes, looking fiercely determined, as if saying this was difficult, but necessary. "You could be more aggressive, if you wanted. I know... I've known you're holding back, most of the time. I'm not fragile, you know, just short is all." She nodded once, sharply, then said, "I chose to be with you, Doctor. I didn't have to, not ever, and you're not doing either of us any favors holding parts of you in check. You're the cleverest man in the universe and you wouldn't even think of not letting anyone know that. So why hide something else?"

He started to laugh. He knew he was supposed to be serious, that she was being serious with him, but it was such a wonderful thing, and she was so funny, and he was just completely in love and completely happy. He had to laugh, because if he didn't, he would explode. Rose glared at him, indignant. Her glare started to crack slowly, and when she started to smile, too, the Doctor stopped laughing, because his breath caught in his throat. 

"You are so beautiful," he choked out. 

"Thanks," Rose mumbled, suddenly shy. She leaned up and kissed his chin, about the highest point she could reach. "But... am I doing something wrong? Is it... not right?"

He shook his head. "I think anything that feels good between us is right. We're in uncharted territory here, aren't we?"

"Oh." Rose shrugged a little and the Doctor finally moved off of her, only to turn them a little so that she could lay beside him, their scattered belongings protecting them from too much exposure to the hard ground - not that they noticed much any more. "Yeah, good point. But I want you to be happy..."

"And I am, happier than I've ever been in my lives. And I want you to be happy, too. You're my partner now, if you want to be. If we ever get back to the others."

"I just thought..."

"It's perfectly natural in the face of death, Rose. The procreative drive is a survival instinct..."

Rose shot him a look that might have been worried and it might have been teasing. "Just survival?" she asked. She seemed - it felt - it seemed to feel, as if she was very concerned, and just trying to cover her fear with humor.

"No!" The Doctor sat up and leaned over her, peering intently into her and wishing he could enter her mind, just long enough to let her know how serious he really was here. "Rose, I would take vows with you this moment, with only this tree to bear witness. I want to be yours and I want you to be mine, if you'll have me. Even if you can't decide now..." He took a deep breath. "I want you, my Rose, my Wolf. I want you in my bed, in my life, whatever we make of it. I want your company, and your time, and your children. It's really quite simple to me."

Rose flinched. "Children?" she questioned. "You mean us, kids, you and me, 'procreation', that's actually possible?"

The Doctor leaned back to consider. "I hadn't really thought otherwise," he admitted. "You'd know better than I would, this time..."

She slowly climbed to her feet, wincing slightly as she moved certain ways. He might not have actually hurt her this time, but she was going to be sore. "In my original Universe, my species eventually cross-bred itself out of existence." She grinned, then winced again, so the Doctor got to his feet to help her. "Everyone but this one bitchy trampoline evolved, went on, changed. She chucked everything into a bin bag and claimed to be the only human left. What she was wasn't human, though. So there was me, the last human, there with the last Time Lord. It was weird." She reached over and snatched up her bright jacket. "I s'pose it must be, then, and I've not done anything to stop it..."

The Doctor frowned. "Nor me, not that..."

"No, s'okay," Rose said. "You'd've never thought of it. Kids are rare here."

"Very," the Doctor said. "I'm sorry, it never occurred to me..."

"It's different where I come from," Rose soothed. "If anybody shoulda thought, it shoulda been me. Though what I'da done, I dunno." She shrugged one of their packs onto her shoulder. "I've been here more than a year, by my time."

"You have very short years," the Doctor observed.

"Time flies with you around," she announced playfully. "Sometimes in more ways than one." It was a pun, somehow, and a bad one, and they both knew it. He grinned impishly and reached for her. She squealed and fled, her laughter trailing like singing light behind her.

The Doctor charged after her, admiring her rangy grace, and more proud than repentant about what he had done to it. His legs were longer, so he didn't hurry, broad strides serving to keep him at an even pace behind her flat-out run. He decided to catch her when they were in the clearing between the trees.

Instead, she stopped still at the verge of the clearing, and the Doctor remembered how they'd spent the morning. "Let's go the other way," he suggested. 

"Let's," Rose agreed, taking his arm.

He turned her and they walked some distance in a third direction, away from where they'd been before, and from the clearing. Abruptly, though, Rose stopped. The Doctor was forced to stop with her or fall over. "What is it?"

"I just thought," she admitted, slowly, brown eyes huge and lips trembling slightly.

"What?" he insisted.

"What's on this planet that could possibly kill a Sontaran?"

The Doctor's eyes widened with the force of his surprise. He was meant to be the genius, but it had not even occurred to him. "Let's get away from here," he suggested.

"Now," Rose agreed, her eyes flashing. She reached over and entwined their hands. It felt like a thunderclap, and then they were moving. Rose laughed and the Doctor watched their footing as they charged headlong under the single, merry, mad syllable: "Run!"

**

There came a time when they began to feel safe again, when the urgent flight stopped and the stories began again. There came a moment when fear was not the only thing they knew, merely one of the facts of this life of theirs, as it had always been. 

There came a time when they had cold to worry about more than war, and hunger became a far more important concern than a nebulous enemy. There came a time when winter was their enemy, and when they were each all the warmth the other could find in the world.

There came a spring again, even in the bleak and blasted, rocky wilds where mountains older than most worlds will ever be loomed, crimson, jagged, and eternally capped with snow. There came the rains, then, revealing a dry riverbed that cut a deep trench between the two mountain ranges before falling away into nothingness. 

And there, at the End of the World, the Doctor and the Wolf named Rose stood, hand in hand, and looked out into the abyss to see what looked back at them.


	6. Chapter 6

"Stand on the edge with me," she said, and he stood there with her, hand in hand. A strange, nearly unnatural calm settled over his mind as he gazed at the end of everything he had ever known. 

This was what was real, this was where he had been meant to be. Nine hundred years ago, he had been found on the sheltered slopes of this very mountain, and here at the end of the world, he had returned to the breathless waiting of that foundling child. 

Before this journey began, Rose, and even the Doctor, would not have been strong enough for the final leg of this trip. The climb down the dry river's cut was treacherous and exhausting, and a single slip could be fatal. They took what precautions they could, made safety every way their primitive ingenuity allowed, but in the end it was all up to endurance of two bodies and the limited mercy of the World's gravity.

It took them two days, and one night, and pausing to rest was impossible. The stones were sharp, the dirt was damp and clingy, the primitive vegetation was healthy like nothing else in the World. The wind was bitter and stubborn, and the sun didn't quite reach.

Halfway down the cut, when there was nothing but the two of them in endless, icy darkness, the Wolf spoke so seriously. "Doctor, I just want you to know..."

"Rose?" he whispered, terrified and anticipating at once.

"If I, if we, um, don't make it, or whatever. I just wanted to say, to tell you..."

He could only just see her clinging to the rock right next to him, her eyes focused on the tiny pinpoint light of her little electric torch. He wanted to touch her, to see her shine, to hold her in his arms and look into her eyes when he finally got to hear this. It wasn't very fair, really, but he supposed he would take what there was.

Her voice cracked and heavy with pain and tenderness, she whispered, "Oh, you know."

And he thought he rather did.

So it was that, two days after they started, two people staggered out onto the valley floor for the first time in as long as history could remember. They were cold and filthy, exhausted and injured, and very nearly as starved as they looked. They were also alive and together, and to the Doctor and to the Wolf, that was all that mattered.

"I think it's cleaner than we are," Rose commented flippantly. She had every right to be flippant, really, since the Doctor was laughingly kissing the ground at her feet. She screamed then, glee and surprise and wonder, as he stood to full height and snatched her up, spinning her around and around in the twilight.

"We made it!" he bellowed, his voice huge and booming as it thundered back up into the mountains behind them.

"We made it!" the mountains cried back in joy.

"We made it," Rose whispered her echo, crossed her ankles at his back, and wrapped her arms around his neck. There, she tucked her head into his chest and wept.

**

_The mastery of time has a price, and that price is this: that time, once conquered, must forever remain in check. Those who move through time at will become forever bound to that movement, eternal prisoner to that which they govern. Endlessness is the debt, and it must be paid manifold._

**

The morning sun rose over an oasis, vermilion with grass that grew thick and as tall as the Doctor's waist. Wind-blown water plants made decorative curtains between the deepening water and the bank, and Rose was out beyond them, her fair skin turning to gold again under the caress of the auburn light. The Doctor, stalking her from the bank, watched her ablutions in fascination.

She had deserted him when he began cataloging every kind of life he had never seen before - or rather, she let him go on with it for ten minutes before she actually gave up on him. She'd started stripping and he'd insisted on not allowing his mind to wander. She'd padded naked into the cool stream and he'd forced himself to concentrate. She had squealed with glee and started up her soft sing-song about the joys of being properly clean, and he had decided she needed to be taught a lesson about the seriousness of a scientist's endeavors.

He really meant to do this. He had every intention of wading out into the water after her and hauling her, dripping, slippery, and protesting, into his waiting arms. He weighed the possibilities. He had the option of turning her over his knee, putting matching pink handprints on both round cheeks of her pert little bottom. Or, he could just impale her right there, tug her up around his waist and slip inside her, lick the clean fresh water from her skin. 

He'd just about made up his mind to go for the second option - or maybe a combination of the two - when he realized she'd slipped away while he was busy fantasizing. Too confused to worry yet, he jumped out onto the stone outcropping near to where she'd been. The water was a bit deep here, but it was also clear as glass. Rose was no where to be seen. He looked sharply right and left for her.

The hot touch at his ankle startled him enough that her quick tug pulled him right off the rock. He landed gracelessly, with a tremendous splash, and the sound of triumphant giggles accompanied his flailing flop to resurface. He stood and shoved water out of his eyes, shook it out of his hair. The curls straightened under the weight of water, leaving him with a tangled tumble that tickled half-way to his waist.

He sputtered and tried to do two or three things at once, get his footing, clear his vision, and stop the various nuisance sensations of being half-way wet. He also had every intention of pouncing on Rose as soon as he was absolutely sure where his lupine little mischief had gone. 

He didn't succeed in this plan, either, for the Wolf in question tackled him from behind. He didn't go under this time, but he did tumble again, and only the nature of water saved him from bruising his bum rather thoroughly. Before he'd even accustomed himself to sitting in water up to his chest, Rose had wrapped herself around his back and was doing something to his hair.

"Personally, I like invitations," he said, as graciously as he could. He considered letting her know that he was capable of removing her if he had to do - he just wasn't interested enough, yet.

"Tried that," she mumbled.

The Doctor instantly felt a little less put upon. She'd explained outright, as well as hinting more subtly, that she'd like him to join her in the water. Now, as the heavily herbed scent of the soap Rose had been carefully hoarding their entire trip hit his nose, the Doctor realized that she was probably going to win this round. Her fingers reached his scalp, soothing, massaging. He was completely happy.

She seemed to find nothing wrong with washing him from her precarious perch, but the Doctor was starting to find it a very sensual, sexual experience. "Wolf, we can't." He murmured the caution even as he knew he wanted to ignore it, not merely for the immediate reasons, but for the long term ones as well. 

They'd never discussed it, not even once, since the day last fall, and he'd gone out of his way to be careful enough that it hadn't come up again. As much as he really wanted to go with what he'd decided earlier, as much as he wanted to love her until she couldn't remember her name, he'd only had to touch her for the knowledge to work its way through the hormone haze cocooning his thoughts right now.

If he took her now, the circumstances would almost certainly be perfect. His seed would take root in her fertile womb, and only time would remain before she would bear their child. He could taste it in the salt of her skin, smell it in the air around her, and feel it, somehow, with senses strange and deep that defied mortal reason. He knew, without doubt or explanation: if they made love now, winter would see her heavy with his son.

"Doctor?" she asked, sliding down his body and into the water, making him ache for her.

"Rose," he hissed, as she slid around him and made herself comfortable against his twitching erection. Her name was perfect for the depths of passion, sounding just as lovely cried, whimpered, or groaned.

He shook himself. "Rose, we can't."

"Can't what?" she wondered, trying to put on an innocent face. In the water, she started rubbing her heat against his erect penis. He could feel her clitoris against the tip, and groaned deep in his chest. 

He whispered a prayer for strength to gods the Survivors didn't even have, then put his hands on her hips to steady her. He could plunge into her once, twice maybe, and then he could stop...

He forced himself away from that line of thought, even as she moved herself up and down against him. "It won't be comfortable in water, I guess," she said, but didn't seem willing to stop herself.

"No, it won't," he agreed. "But that's not all. Rose... Wolf... you... um..." He didn't know how to tell her he'd worked out her body's cycles. The women he knew before her kept track of all these things themselves, or so he'd heard from the other men. He didn't know - he'd never gone regularly to anyone's bed, and certainly hadn't found anyone willing to let him in on the feminine mysteries. 

She stopped moving and looked deeply into his eyes, pulling herself away from him only enough to make him more desperate for her. "You're nervous," she said softly. "What's wrong?"

The Doctor sighed, and let his head fall back. "I can... I see... It's just, you don't want..."

Rose gave him a dubious look and peered insistently into his eyes. He wondered what she saw there, if she knew how alien he sometimes felt, even to himself. Taking his hands and pulling back from him enough for a serious question, she gently pressured, "I don't want what?"

Just take her, he thought. "Children," he mumbled instead. 

She flinched, then tilted her head to the side, her eyes widening. "Oh, my god, I forgot!" Her arms went around him and she pulled him tight, a perfectly normal and perfectly out of place hug. "Thank you so much, I was keeping track, but we lost a day up on the mountain..." Her words were breathless, her gratitude and sincerity making him feel worse than nervousness had felt before.

She seemed to finally notice that, after she'd disentangled herself from him and they'd both fumbled to their feet. "Doctor, I hope you don't think it's forever," she said softly.

As a matter of fact, he'd started to think they were. He glared at her, angry because he didn't want to be hurt, not any more. All he wanted was to care for her, to love her, to be with her, and all she wanted... he had no idea what she wanted, really. She'd never said. They'd talked constantly for moons and moons, and she'd never actually said anything. Everything he ever learned about her was a bomb dropped on him out of a clear copper sky.

He wanted to rage and storm at her, but he loved her so much, the very idea of causing her pain shredded him inside. So he just stared, wondering what he'd ever done to deserve her, for good or ill, for wonder or secrets.

"It isn't," Rose insisted, her voice tender, comforting. "If we make it through this, if... if you even still want me..." She took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. "I could be a mum someday... if... if you..."

It was all the Doctor needed, to stop the terror driving his racing heart rates, to start a smile edging tentatively onto his face. She wasn't talking about leaving him, ending this, giving up what they'd learned and become together. All right, she'd mentioned dying, but it wasn't a real concept that he could actually contemplate.

She trailed off then, grinning her pretty, wolfish grin, as if the subject had flitted out of her mind with the appearance of his smile. "You need a lot of things to get by on the universe's weirdest primitive planet, but you know what you really, really need?"

The Doctor grinned helplessly right back at her. "Bar of soap?" he suggested wryly. 

Rose laughed. "A hand to hold," she told him simply, and reached out, and pulled him down into the water. 

There was a lot of squealing on Rose's part, the sort of noise one would never expect to come from a woman who justifiably called herself a Wolf, and quite a bit of boisterous laughter on the Doctor's part, which was actually even rarer. They got clean, he supposed, and they certainly made a racket. He was never so glad before that there weren't any large animals on the world any more, because if there were, they'd've been eaten for sure - unless their lunacy frightened the poor beasts away altogether.

They finally decided to get out only when the Wolf began complaining that they'd turn into something called raisins and held up waterlogged hands to demonstrate. That was another random difference between their two species, and Rose found it amusing even as the Doctor found his mind explaining every minute difference between their skin-types, and at a cellular level, too. Then, he happened to check to see if it was only her finger tips, and that was all the thinking he could do.

The water was knee-deep on him, and the Doctor couldn't take his eyes off where it rippled and swirled right around Rose's dark and dripping curls. She gave him a sultry smile and he didn't know what to do. Everything felt heavier - the result of the shift between being buoyant and not, but perhaps it was more, as well.

"Look at you," he murmured, unable to stop staring. He wanted to drink the beaded water from her skin, kiss it from her thighs, lap it from the silk petals of her center. He wanted to sink into the intense heat of her, drown in her, forever. Water traced over her skin like his fingertips ached to do, water licked at her like he wanted to do, water was making him completely, absurdly jealous.

"Doctor," she gasped.

He was beyond staring, he was leering, owning her with his eyes. Abruptly, he reached for her, caught her arm, turned her slightly so he could look at that mark on her shoulder, his name written there for all the world to read. She gasped again and he released her, retreating abruptly to the shore.

He should have stuck to his studies. He stalked up onto the bank, a too-tall, too-thin, too-strange thing, made entirely of anger and want. Why did he have to care that all this was wrong? Why did it have to matter? Why did he have to know so very well that someone had to do something, and soon, to change all of this back to the way it was supposed to be, before the whole of eternity shattered and scattered into an extropic void?

Why him? Why? He flung himself down on the bank and looked up into the orange sky above them, staring blackly into the beyond, knowing like no one else knew that this was wrong.

"Doctor?"

The Wolf loomed large above him with the sun high in her hair, turning her radiance to pure liquid gold. "You are so beautiful," she whispered, kneeling down with him, her fingers going to his face. She touched his nose, brushed his lips, stroked his cheeks.

He shook his head. "Rose..."

Her finger stilled his words. "You always gotta over-complicate everything."

"What?"

"Just, we'll worry about the bad stuff when it gets here. Right now, I just wanna make you happy." She leaned back gave him the same sex-drenched smile she'd used in the river. "Actually, I wanna make you come. Let me?"

"But..."

She knelt before him now, placing tiny kisses all along his shoulders and his collar bone, kisses that varied between gentle brushes of her lips to delicate laps from that clever tongue of hers to light, tingly nips from her sharp little teeth. While she kissed, she kept whispering, the kisses becoming punctuation. "It's comforting, loving you, touching you. Stops the chaos in my head. Makes me feel safe, you know?"

He nodded, understanding that statement completely. He felt safe with her, too, even though he knew that this ache in his chest belonged to her, this hollow place inside him was his longing for her, the completion he could only feel when they were united. The entirety of reality could collapse at any moment, the wholesale slaughter of every living thing could come here without any hint of warning. And yet, while his Rose was with him, while he was with her, there was a place secure from all of this, between them: a still point.

"Doctor?" she whispered, peering deep into his eyes, hers dark and wide, almost innocent in their ageless wonder. It was this that drew him more than anything, the kind of innocence that learned and learned and yet remained forever unassailable. 

"Rose, I..." The words caught in his throat. He'd not said them in months, and they stuck there, now, jagged edges threatening to shred everything if he tried to push them out.

She nodded sharply, eyes over bright, and reached up to touch his face. "Me, too," she said, and fiercely, she kissed him.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The verse cited in this chapter is Ecclesiastes 3:1 - or you could attribute the Beatles, if you like.
> 
> The oath cited, however, is original.

Springtime made itself plain as the Doctor and Rose journeyed deeper into the heart of the fertile valley. From the river's verge, a sea of vivid red grass spread in tall, bending waves, bowing to the world, reaching for the sky.

The gently rolling plain gave way to cascades of flowers, but not the scruffy, dust-colored flowers from the amber desert above. Rather, these were healthy beauties that mere color couldn't describe, that prismed across the fields in saffron and chartreuse, in heliotrope and ecru. Rose called them daisies and poppies and lilies and she stopped to smell them, laughed beneath great mossy swards of them, her shining face a pale new flower, tiny in their midst. 

The Doctor loved her so much it hurt. Every single day, he believed he had reached the heights and depths of his devotion, and then another ray of sunshine would glance across her face, another beam of moonlight would etch a gleam into her hair. She would say something whimsical or just plain right, would do something fantastic and simple and brilliant at once. 

He proudly fed her on the golden apples borne so early by the silver trees; too high for her small hands to reach them, he had to bring them down for her, and he understood how, in another lifetime, he would have brought suns and moons and stars to lay at her feet. She gave her everything back to him, in her quiet ways, told him long, gentle stories about her old homeworld and the people who lived there, thousands of people, millions, and many of them had never seen even one person die. She sang songs she'd learned back then, about things the Doctor could only imagine, like moonless nights or deep blue oceans. There were legends, myths, histories, from more people than he had ever imagined could exist, and she had them in her head, and relayed them in words like fire.

In another Universe, she told him at the last, all those lives, every single one of them, had been saved, at least once, by one man, one man so utterly incredible that the whole frame of time and space curved itself around what became of him. In another Universe, that man had been born to the Lords of Time, and he'd destroyed them to save everyone else from their enemy, and from what they themselves had become. 

The burden was vast and terrible, and the storm that man brought with him was as tragic as it was triumphant, as necessary as it was excruciating. He had a great and cruel duty, and raced every where he went one step ahead of Death. He had such love and such power, and such beauty, and such fear, and all of it at an unspeakable price.

He was savior and destroyer in one breath, and though universes existed where he had never been born, nothing good could come to one that followed the curve of his existence if he was not there to support the weight of what fell upon his shoulders. This universe, where everything crumbled, was such a place, and that man was here, all innocent of his power, and of the chains that bound it. He remained himself, however, and visible, obvious, his storm following in his wake. He was their changeling child, the one they never understood, the one they envied and despised and depended on, all at the same time. He had a name that stayed with him, no matter what, the name of what he was, the surgeon who could be a butcher, the poison that could heal. The Doctor.

It was the Wolf's turn to hold him as he cried.

**

_...To everything, there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven..._

**

The stream and the moorland and even the very sky seemed to tumble down into the center of the valley, a cascade of reality all falling into a pool of undefined source. As they mounted the last hurtle of a hill, they slowed down, their pace an amble, a stroll, a wander. The Doctor felt, somehow knew, and thought that Rose shared his knowledge, that this was the last of their peace. Despite the difficulties of the journey, two people alone in a sparse wilderness, there'd been a life in it, an adventure he'd started to think would never end. This, though, the last mile, the last hill, the last step, this was the end.

After this, everything changed, a new course set for not just where they were going, but who they were entirely. They had talked before of what they believed they'd find, one of their two favorite entertainments for quiet nights. Rose believed they'd find a machine, something that those who should have been could have left behind within the fluctuations of the World's hazy reality. The Doctor agreed with her, but there was something else, something impossible, like the heart of a live star, like the core of a dead one. He didn't know how he knew this, anymore than he could explain anything else that came wandering through the caverns and valleys of his intellect.

They had stopped talking about it, though, perhaps back at the river, perhaps as far back as the cliff, the conversations too double-edged now, as they came closer to the place where it almost felt like they were being summoned. There was that in the Doctor that almost hoped they'd find nothing, no answers, no mysteries, no conclusions, just a cozy heart of a fertile valley. The Survivors could live here, live well and, given infinite time, make the golden domes and shining cities. They could build that world he sometimes saw, build it over in the image of hope instead of isolation, in the image of courage instead of fear. They could rise from their own ashes, like the firebird of Rose's stories, like their own old legends.

Or, the travelers could turn around and walk away, forget they'd made it this far, journey back to the base of the cliff and spend the rest of their lives there. They could build a home and a farm, for this place could grow food, and they could lie together beneath their own roof every night and raise their children in the knowledge that though there might be more than this, there was nothing better. Two people making a family and a family making a life, and the Doctor and his Wolf Rose could be in the center of it, instead of forever on the outside, looking in.

In his hearts, he knew it could not happen, that he could never convince Rose to stay here in ignorance forever. He couldn't even convince himself. If all else failed, his curiosity would drive him, drive him forward and ever onward, and to his death if needed. He was a wanderer, no more fit for civilization than he was for peace and quiet. (Though he did wonder where that self-damning thought originated.)

There were answers here, and even if they were devastating, horrible answers, they had to be sought, reached for, found. 

"I don't want to go," Rose whispered. 

The Doctor nodded, understanding completely. For just a moment longer, they stopped together, arms entwined, lips touching, hearts beating together in the rhythm that made them complete, unique in all eternity, theirs alone.

They took each other's hands, and took that last step, together.

**

_"When you are hungry, I will bring you food and when you are thirsty, I will give you my own drink. When you are weary, you may rest in my places, and when you sleep, I will guard you. I will claim all your children, guide their first steps with my own hands, and teach them everything I know. If you stay, I will give you shelter, and if you go, I will go with you. This is my promise to you: while you wish me to be with you, I am yours."_

**

In the cradle of the world, there was a Tree. It was an ancient thing, so vast its boughs shadowed whole acres, so tall it seemed the easiest path between the world and the stars. The whole of the sky could easily be supported on its broad swept limbs, and if someone had told the Doctor that the sun itself was hung from the highest branches, he thought he might believe. 

The noise Rose made, a soft, staggered breath, described the Doctor's own feelings quite eloquently, he thought. It was phenomenal, tremendous, and if there was any living thing older, anywhere at all, he couldn't even conceive of it.

So complete was his fascination with the Tree that it was several long minutes before he even noticed the Song. Once he became aware of it, though, he couldn't understand how he had missed it, how he had ever missed it at all, even long before he knew it existed. 

It sounded in his mind, he thought, more than in his ears, but however he heard it, it was the Song he had always known. It was about him, and it was too big to be about something as small as him, a completely real truth, and a wholly otherworldly story. It was the Song the Wolf sang by the fire, and it was the tune Flavia hummed as she worked, and it was the music the rain made as it tumbled, rarer than diamonds, from a grey-green sky. It was the notes of Romana laughing and the lyrics of the elders' stories, and the timbre of the wind dancing across the mountains. It was everything, and it was somehow even more than that, and the Doctor was transfixed by it, utterly.

"I know that Song," the Wolf whispered, and the Doctor was surprised that even she could vanish to the periphery of his attention in the strength of the Song.

"Me, too," he agreed. He didn't want to say it, but knew someone should: "We need to go down there."

Rose nodded, and held his hand in hers, shaking as she took one step toward the Tree, and then another. They kept a steady pace, following the swift merry cadence of the Tree's endless tune. It still seemed to take an age to reach the shelter of the shining limbs, and then still ages more to reach the immense silver trunk. There was something unexplained about it, time going all odd and sketchy within the Tree's purview. 

He wouldn't have been surprised to find his hair gone stark white, to find Rose twice her age or half it, to find either of them renewed, completely different. The Wolf wouldn't change, she'd said, her form once and final. Nevertheless, he could see her in other lives, with long dark hair, with starlight eyes. He could see her more changeless than even she had implied, a divine and deathless creature made of time and moonlight, weeping tears of fire. He saw her as he had first seen her, a strange, brave, shining thing bathed in torchlight, and as he had first seen her, terrified and too young, and still too curious by half. He saw her as he had last seen her, alone and not alone on a barren beach, and not there, and everywhere, and always hereafter the last lovely thing his eyes beheld.

"What's happening?" she gasped out, her voice more frightened than it had ever been, shaking as she clung to him.

"Some sort of quasitranstemporal morphotic inversion!"

Rose stopped. She just stopped, and looked up at him, and her eyes danced with relief and mirth. "You just made that up, didn't you?"

He grinned. "But it sounds good!"

"Should've thrown a 'meta' in there," she decided.

"Or a 'quantum'," he agreed. "Quantum's a good one for 'makes no sense, unless it does!'" 

Rose chuckled weakly, and the Doctor couldn't help but think she was looking a bit blurry. She gasped, in obvious pain, as some unknowable something rushed over them. The Doctor couldn't say that he exactly felt it, but something else went skittering and jiggering across his awareness, and the Wolf bent nearly double. "Well, however meta or quantum it is, how the hell do we stop it?"

"Like this," he said, wholly certain, without reason or justification, just convinced. He reached up and touched the nearest branch.

There was a tremendous silence. The Song, in all its infinite progressions, hit a sudden interlude, and the entire orchestra of its sound was suspended. Rose stared up at the Doctor, her eyes shining, and everything suddenly felt perfect, right, complete. 

"Rose," he breathed. 

The percussion began again, first, the soft, rolling sound of distant thunder. There was a pipe next, a high, silver sound, like a bird, like air. More woodwinds joined, then more, and then horns and brass, cheery and curious. 

The Wolf smiled up at the Doctor, her eyes so bright he could see stars that could never exist within their golden depths. He could feel her, fully with him in this moment, his wholly for once in their lives, part of them and not a prize the universe was letting him borrow. He could feel her, moving inside him like fire, like light, like breath. He could feel her.

"Rose."

She nodded. 

"Here, in this place," he said. "With this Tree to bear witness.."

She nodded again, shining tears sparkling like her sunny smile. 

"This is where I make vows to you." He reached to touch her face, sensing that, just this once, there was no need to worry, no need to even ask. He did it, anyway, because there were too many times his Rose had never heard words she should be freely given. "Will you take them with me?"

She nodded, and her lips moved, in words of his language, words older than even he and his people ever used, but happy, so charmed that the old words seemed more like a new descant to the Song. And her eyes laughed while she said them, and her heart laughed inside him. "Better with two."


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quotation cited in this chapter is from "The Book of the Old Time" (from the Classic episode "The Deadly Assassin"

When the moon rose, full and immense, that night, it looked down over two bare, golden bodies, and painted them ethereally blue in its eerie light. More true than the World was real, the most ancient ceremony of her old world crowned the vows they made one another, uniting their bodies as a symbol of their lives. The eldest Tree was the only witness, but the Wolf said that was the way it should be, the way it would have been, oaths taken in old groves and sacred places, graced by the light of the moon.

"We've been two lone wolfs, you and I," Rose said, her arms and her heart and her mind reaching for him, "and now we're never alone again."

He slipped inside her then, in every possible way, knowing her body so well, and learning that he knew her mind the same. She trembled beneath him, always trembled, his cold and her anticipation making her shake in his arms every time. They built the rhythm, their rhythm, in and out, slick and slide, pumping, rocking, climbing ever higher. Inside, it was the same, a maelstrom of thought, building, ever building, higher, higher, need, want, please, fuck, just, love...

He thrust into her body, crazy with need, to have her, to give to her, to mark her, to keep her, to win her, to make her his. He could sense her thoughts, maddening, tempting things, flicking through him, begging for more, and not to stop, and to have just a little bit more, deeper, harder, more information, more thrusting, more touching, his thumb on her clit, his hearts in her hands, kiss her breasts, whisper her name in her ear...

He thought he whispered he loved her as he came, but she believed he shouted it, and he had no way to know if that was him or her, or whose lips he had used, so mixed up within her that he felt her coming around him from the inside, tightening around his cock, the explosion of radiating pleasure pushing them back and forth between who they were and who they weren't. 

He came again, and so did she, when he tried to separate them, the sheer bliss of being so tangled up together making a friction that blasted them both to euphoria as he tried to extricate them from each other. There was laughter then, and probably tears, and they curled together under the sheltering arms of the Tree, watching the stars blink on and off overhead in the distant, broken night. 

"And this is it, then?" the Doctor wondered, but it might have been Rose's question, drifting inside him. Before daybreak, they dressed, and dozed together, waiting, without knowing how they knew, for what came with the morning.

What came with the morning was a man, tall and gaunt and unbelievably ancient, and as the lovers looked at him, and he looked down at them, they obviously weren't, any of them, the slightest bit surprised.

**

_...And Rassilon journeyed into the Black Void with a great fleet. Within the Void, no light would shine, and nothing of that outer nature continue in being, except that which existed within the Sash of Rassilon. Now Rassilon found the Eye of Harmony, which balances all things that they may neither flux, nor whither, nor change their state in any measure. And he caused the Eye to be brought to the world of Gallifrey, wherein he sealed this Beneficence with the Great Key. And the people rejoiced..._

 

**

"I knew you would come," the old man said, and his voice was as brittle as his skin, which looked like a dried, forgotten parchment. 

"Who are you?" the Doctor ventured first, because he knew everyone in the World, but had never seen or even heard of this man.

"It began when the Daleks took Ascenta," said the old man. The Doctor didn't believe this was meant as a reply. He seemed to be beginning a story, and possibly as if he'd continue the story with or without them.

"Daleks," the Wolf growled at the Doctor's side.

"One of They Who Destroy," the Doctor explained, even though he suspected it wasn't needed.

"Always," she agreed.

The old man confirmed the Doctor's theory, talking with slow, measured, nearly lyrical tones regardless of what was occurring in his audience. "The Daleks took Ascenta, and the Time Lords finally felt the threat, since it was lying there on their own hearths at last."

"Time Lords," the Doctor realized. The Wolf had used that term once, too. She'd said it should have belonged to them, to the Survivors. It felt right.

"They raised an army - an army of the dead."

"How?" the Doctor wondered, interrupting the old man's recitation despite himself. 

"The Matrix," came the answer.

"It is just me," the Wolf joked, "or did that sound like there should've been a crack of thunder there?"

"Bolt of lightning," the Doctor agreed, "earthquake."

"Drumroll, at least."

"Oh, at the very least."

"Always, you mock, Doctor." The old man's tone was knowing and scathing, and the Doctor refused to let him win this round.

"No, I don't mock the Doctor," said the Doctor. "I've been known to mock Borusa when it suited me. Kalten on occasion. Runcible, for a lark."

"I mock turtles," Rose put in helpfully, and the Doctor had a sudden picture of a book from a place called Wonderland. (The mock turtle came from there, somehow.)

"This is why this happened!" Their visitor was enraged, but very formally enraged, his voice losing none of its ponderousness, nothing of its grandeur as he ranted. "This whole universe, and everything that comes from it, it is all because you are a feckless child, a blundering fool..."

"Oi!" Rose charged in, even as the Doctor wondered if it were true. He'd always felt so very guilty. "You can't tell 'im that in front of me. Not with what I know..."

"Rose Tyler, the girl with the golden eyes." He smiled, but it wasn't a nice smile at all. "The only goddess your faithless lover ever believed in, sold for a song to a summer storm..."

She stood firm, stubborn, as changeless as she'd ever claimed to be. "Hasn't happened yet," she said. "Maybe never will: this place is a complete wreck, so we might all die. What'd you do to it?"

"I did only what they bade me," he said. The Doctor was fascinated that he denied responsibility for everything while still denying nothing. "They brought back their armies when Ascenta fell, and by the time Arcadia was lost, they were bringing back two enemies for every single champion they summoned. So they reached farther, reached into the high past, reached deep. They found me, the greatest of them..."

"Certainly the most egotistical," the Doctor supplied coldly. "Forgot your name, did you?"

"Your father should have drowned you at birth," the man dodged, again. "For his sake, alone, in his memory, I let you live. Now, I see it was just as well, because you have saved our world, again and at last."

"Can't you just tell us without all the jealousy and social commentary?" Rose demanded. "Facts would help a lot more than your opinion, whoever the hell you are."

"Silence, alien creature..."

"She's no more alien than you are," the Doctor interrupted, firmly. "Less, in fact, since we know her and don't know you." The old man opened his mouth, raised his hand as if to object, yet again, but the Doctor was impatient, this close to the real truth. "Tell me how to fix this, now, whoever you are."

"Time's Champion. Ka Faraq Gatri. The Oncoming Storm."

"No," Rose interrupted, and the Doctor thought the mountains might wander off before her mind changed. "That's not you, I know that's not you, 'cuz that's him, and whatever else you are, you're not him."

The old man shook his head heavily, as though it weighed more than the immense Tree beside them. The Doctor realized then that there was something else to his list of harsh titles, an explanation, an accusation. It was not a claim, as Rose had misunderstood. "I did as they bade me," the stranger said. "I took him away. I did not kill him: I could not. But I knew his history and how they found him, and I found him first and kept him safe."

"Thanks?" asked the Doctor, because he honestly wasn't sure he should be at all grateful.

"Our world changed at once. They thought that, without him, there would be no Dalek threat, no threats at all, because he has seemed the thing everything followed, the left-hand son of Chaos. What they did not, could not see, was that things don't follow him. He doesn't stir them up, as they believed."

"I know," said Rose, softly, and the Doctor felt strange to hear something so like his own eulogy being spoken in his conscious presence.

Once again, the old man continued his speech as if no one had spoken. His tone grew far more grim. "He stands athwart them, ever. The Sontarans took the World. So we destroyed them as well. So the Rutan host took the World. So we destroyed it. So the Cybermen took the whole galaxy. It was a cascade effect: for every enemy stopped, two greater threats bloomed like the Hydra in its place. And always, always, the Daleks came, again and again, each time stronger and more terrible than before."

"They would." Rose's compassion was showing, now, and something else as well, firm determination and the golden fire of her eyes. "You tried to stop them?"

"It is my nature at the heart of it all, child," he said, and he sounded almost kind in the face of her gentling tone. "I am Omega, the end of things, and all things ended at my hand."

The Doctor frowned. "It splintered?" he questioned. His head was swirling with patterns, with ideas and histories and times that never were. At the back of it all, above and behind and beyond, was the Song, chorded firm against the whole unraveling cosmos, not water in a desert, but rain in the face of endless aridity. He knew answers, now, answers to questions that could never be asked, and yet there was always more to know. "You unmade... what? Yourself?"

Omega looked marvelously offended for a moment, head high, shoulders square, jaw more firm than the mountains behind them. "I unleashed one of the Eventualities, and..." The old man trailed off and though the Doctor didn't know why, he was still grateful, because there was only so much of the monstrous headache building inside him that he could endure. "Yes."

Memory he didn't have - did - thundered through the Doctor's skull, driving, beckoning. "Not your hands," he realized, feeling sick. "Your Hands."

The old man chuckled darkly. "I should have known you'd seen them. One of them tried to follow you in the worlds that were. But that's past now, irrelevant." He nodded slowly, elegantly. "Only one Eventuality remains; nothing else we did in ourselves exists."

"The time machines?" the Wolf asked, hesitantly. "What of the... the TARDISes?"

The Song crescendoed in the Doctor's head for a moment, the sound so loud he thought for sure they'd all be deafened. That was the fanfare of all fanfares, the announcement, the acceptance. It thundered upward to a vibrant, impossible climax, a choral wail of joy and sorrow in equal measures, and then it drifted, subtle as starlight, away back into itself.

"Ow," Rose said, and rubbed at her ears. "Guess that answered my question..."

"That is where we begin," said Omega. "That is where we find ourselves. The Universe will reassemble if only the One TARDIS can be coalesced."

"That word didn't translate," Rose said, softly, strangely wary. "You mean like what, primary?"

"This Tree," the Doctor explained. "It's not just a Tree. It's something else, too."

"The Seedling," Omega said. "It has grown immense since he first planted it, fed itself in endless dreams and spread itself into the world, pulling it through time and keeping it safe. It is the source of all we are, our servant and our master. It needs only one thing to make it whole, to make it real. It needs only..."

The Wolf rounded on Omega so fast both men started from her. "You're not putting him in the Heart of this thing," she snapped. "There's no way I'll let you, and there's no way at all it'll work, anyway."

"Rose," the Doctor soothed, "if it'll save my people..."

"It won't!" There were tears streaming, unchecked and unheeded down her face. "Didn't you hear him? It's you, it's always got to be you, and..." She shrugged him off when he tried to touch her, and the Doctor was surprised that he'd ever thought her delicate. As fiercely feral as the creature that gave her her name, she crowded the ancient man and snarled, "Find another way."

The Doctor tried to reach for her again, to comfort her, to remind her that it was she herself who'd told him about the weight of the Universe on his shoulders. He intended to tell her all the things he should have said. It wasn't Rose who stopped him this time, though. 

It was the old man, when he clamped a vice-like claw around Rose's wrist. "I did," he said, with almost wicked humor. He pulled her closer. "Bad wolf," he added, nearly a sing-song.

"Very bad," she agreed. "What do you want?"

"You," he said simply, and shoved her at the Tree.

"Wait!" the Doctor cried, trying to catch Rose before she fell. A staff of silver appeared in the man's hand, something shining and blinding that had not been there before. It flickered and spun and kept the Doctor away while Omega pushed Rose toward the Tree and she struggled and stumbled backwards toward it. "Leave her alone!"

"She's exactly what I need," Omega explained. "She's been inside the Heart of Time, and the Heart of Time has been inside her. She's lucky she's only immortal and not insane as well."

"I... what?" Rose fell back over a root of the Tree and landed in the dirt at its base, staring up at Omega with her head tilted to one side. She didn't seem as furious as she was curious anymore, but that was fine with the Doctor because he was furious enough for both of them. The very second Omega's guard faltered, he was going to put a stop to all of this. He stalked them like a wolf himself, a beast separated from his mate by a conjurer's trick. 

"It's what the Eye of Harmony does; you're ridiculous, the pair of you. It's Singularity, the Heart of an impossible star, and you drank it up like water." The Doctor knew he'd meant to do something, but he couldn't take his eyes off the incredulous, unbelieving expression on Rose's face, except to shift to the smug yet wholly frustrated features of Omega. "It's indelible, girl! It doesn't go away by wishing, and this is no fairy tale to be cleaned up by true love's kiss..."

"But my... he... the Doctor then... he took it out of me..."

"Oh, he saved your life, as much as it could be saved, I suppose, but..." Omega shook his head. "No matter. You're exactly what we need."

"You can't have her," the Doctor said, and he was certain he'd never meant anything more in his life.

Omega rounded on him, and the Doctor made a low hand gesture at Rose to run, while he kept Omega's attention focused on himself. "They never understood about you, Doctor, thought you a changeling at best, a monster most of the time. They've never realized that you're one of those things, too, the things that keep them safe, the Great Key, the Living Metal, the Black Stars, the Eventualities."

"You've mentioned those," Rose tried to distract. "What are they? Ways to kill Sontarans or something?"

Omega didn't even look at her, just at the Doctor, but he kept them separated at the same time, his spinning staff an impregnable wall. "That is a much simpler device, and one I control utterly. Choose, girl." He smiled, a cold, blank, mirthless smile, without humor or pity. "Either touch the trunk of the Tree or he dies. He may be our last weapon, but he is one I, at least, can replace."

Her face was a mask of tragedy and conviction as she looked at Omega, somehow seeming to pity him as much as she feared him. Maybe more. It was her nature, after all. Everything she does is so human. "Can't you understand that he's innocent?"

"Innocent?!" Omega nearly hooted with derision. 

She would defend him, the Doctor realized to his horror. She would defend him, and then she would surrender herself for him when that failed. Panic flooded his veins, his hearts hammering out fire instead of blood, his lungs drawing in fear instead of air. His Rose was the true innocent, and she would sacrifice everything she was for him. Again, the whispered not-memories reminded him. Always.

He didn't know what to do. It was killing him, and he couldn't reach her, and she and Omega argued on, though they all knew she'd chosen her path, that she'd made her choice a long time ago. This was the Doctor's nightmare, his favorite fear, a shadow so constant it felt like destiny. He was forever held at bay, made to wait, while Rose took terrible burdens onto her slender shoulders. 

But her bottomless compassion wasn't that of ignorance. Rose was no calm, no lull, no eye of a hurricane. She was the leading edge, the harbinger, a wolf of light and thunder, and she brought the storm in her wake. 

He had a responsibility here, to time, to life, and to Rose. He was the Doctor, and she believed in him. Desperation guided his hand, and conviction steadied it. He reached up, and wrapped his hand around the closest tree branch, so broad that even his long fingers could not span it. He was pleading, begging, commanding all at once, when he turned every real thought and every not-real overlapping one onto two words. "Help me!"

There was nothing, of course. It was only a vegetable, after all, not a sentient creature, just a... 

The silent "sound" was torrential, deafening, tremendous. "Come to Me," was the command.

It was a little like being ordered around by a mountain range, so vast as to be incomprehensible, and so remote as to seem untouchable. Despite having spent his whole life in a state of constant telepathic communion with his people, the Doctor's mind was staggered by the scope and breadth of what he'd "heard". It took him time that felt like years just to piece together comprehension of the simple directive. 

After that, though, it was easy. "Come to Me, and bring your mate," came the much more careful request. The word meanings still covered concepts that the Doctor was startled by, but they weren't impossible for him, not any more. This was his language, the language the Survivors should have had, precise, exact, and evolving. It was the language the Wolf seemed to speak, the language he heard in memories he didn't have. It explained, fully. "Bring" was "enter, and stay, and be together with us". "Me" was a vast, bright, ineffable otherness. "Mate" was Rose, was star twin and sun keeper, time walker and wolf, stranger than nearly every concept given. The strangest of all, the Tree seemed to have saved for the Doctor himself, son and brother, father and student and beloved beyond all reason, savior, pilot and thief, servant, king, teacher, lord, child, light, shadow, hope fear dream...

"How can you?"

Rose's wailing plea cut through the Doctor's communion with the Tree. He staggered toward her on instinct and was brought to his knees by the sudden, teeth-rattling pain of a charge from Omega's staff.

"Doctor!" Rose shrieked. He forced himself to his feet, teeth clenched, body aching in places he didn't even know he had. He waved her off because he didn't have the strength to talk. Omega watched it all with dispassionate interest, before Rose, shoulders slumped and head bowed, said, "Why are you doing this?"

There was a long pause, so long that the Doctor managed to catch his breath, then at last, Omega spoke. "For Gallifrey."

Gallifrey, the Doctor thought. "Gallifrey," Rose murmured. 

**_GALLIFREY!_ **

The Doctor flinched from the Tree's intrusion. He wanted to run away, just grab Rose's hand and fly so far and so fast away from this place that he forgot the terrible thing even existed. It was the defeat in her eyes, her sad, tired, dark gold eyes, that made him choose to stay the harder course. She would keep him fighting forever, and she didn't even know.

"Rose," he said, and he caught her eyes. "Do you trust me?"

"Always," she answered, her words and her heart echoed in her eyes.

Omega looked so wildly triumphant that the Doctor spared a thought to wonder if he ever even saw the blow coming. It was such a simple thing that confusion was the only explanation as to why no one had thought of it sooner. The Doctor reached down and snatched up his pack, and slammed it with all his strength into Omega and his whirling staff. 

Thrown off balance and caught unawares, the old man stumbled and his staff swung wide, striking him in the leg before it stilled. He shrieked in pain, in rage, in defeat, and fell to the dark soil, staining his strange old robes as he writhed. 

The Doctor watched the memories and not-memories in his mind wrestle each other, Omega falling here, Omega falling into oblivion, Omega seizing control of the world, Omega only existing because he himself willed it to be so. "Don't..." the old man managed. "Don't you... don't you..." He drew a breath, and seemed to pull strength in with it. "Dare! Don't you dare, Doctor!" He tried to drag himself to his feet, caught his staff, shrieked in pain again.

The Doctor broke the spell of remembering and not knowing, in the light of Omega's fury, and he reached for Rose's hand over the struggling man's body. "If we do this, there is absolutely no telling what will happen." The Doctor took his chance and, in spite of himself, tried to discourage one of the most stubborn creatures in the history of time. "We could be destroyed, driven mad. He doesn't know half what he thinks he does."

"They never do," Rose said, and she squeezed his hand, and stepped toward the Tree. "You sure about this?" she asked, and the Doctor knew that offering him an out was just as important in her point of view. "The universe could explode."

The Doctor smiled weakly. "So?" he said. Rose beamed at him, and he grinned back, and they put their joined hands up to touch the Tree.


	9. Chapter 9

_Maybe it's all been a dream._

Doctor...?

_But I've heard a voice, all my life, and it's been calling my name._

Doctor... Doctor.

_She stood in the circle of our fire and she told us all her story, with her golden eyes blazing and time dancing to her very breath. They believed her, we all did, and even though they thought us mad, they bade us go in the name of the Survivors, to see what there was to learn at the end of the world._

_We've followed things we don't understand, ideas and images and memories neither of us really have, me and this once-alien girl who called herself after a child's fears. For longer than a year, or maybe longer than forever, we've followed stars that can't even be there, and maps that never will, for hundreds and hundreds of miles._

_And this is the place, at last, beyond the edge of everything, where there's nothing left but whatever it is that stands past reality as I've always known it. It can't matter to me if it hurts or there's nothing besides this, if the only thing that ever happens again is the end. Because if I believe in one thing, just the one, I believe in her, and she's here, the Wolf, my Rose._

My Doctor.

_And I'm here, at last, with her. And this is the story of how I died._

**  
The Doctor opened his eyes. The world made immediate sense to him, though he'd never seen this sort of place before (lived here most of his life), with the mushroom cap of the console sprouting from a body half mechanical and half illusory, yet somehow entirely organic. 

She moved then, ethereal from the shadows, Rose, his Rose, frail mortal thing or endless starfire thing, either way. Rose, daughter of Jackie, Rose, mother of Truth, Rose, sister of Time. Rose of all Roses, Rose of the world - no, sorry, that's William Butler Yeats - and then she was there, and then he thought - remembered - _knew_...

"I can see _everything_ ," he realized.

She smiled, but it was such a mournful, aching expression that the Doctor would have never imagined it, not even on Rose's expressive face. "All that is, was, and ever could be?" He shrugged. She grinned, then, and it lit her eyes. "That's what I see all the time," she said, flippantly. Maybe it was nothing to her, not any more, just time and space folded again and again and stored away and hung up and changed again, like a child in a dressing room full of color. 

"Doesn't it drive you mad?" he wanted - _needed_ \- to know.

She sighed heavily. "No. Sometimes I've wished it would."

The silence grew long between them while she seemed to toy with the air around them, and the Doctor tried to assimilate who he was with who he was becoming with who he had always been. It was like a dam, like a wall had gone down, like he'd finally found a door open, one that had always been kept locked before. 

"I would always have stayed with you forever," he said, because he knew it to be true, and because he knew there was no other time or place or way he could ever say it, only here, at the heart and end of everything. 

"Me too," she answered. "And I suppose, if it's my last chance to say it..."

"No, don't." He interrupted her, not because he didn't want to hear, but because he knew now that it wasn't her turn, that everything she'd ever done had said it, every day. She'd created herself, out of stardust and whole cloth, out of knowledge and pain and so much love, made herself for him in ways both strange and simple. They were two halves of a whole, drawn together inevitably, torn apart just as inevitably, and yet fate could not stop them, and destiny had no part in them, for everything they did they chose for themselves. It was love and sacrifice, always, and only time ever separated them, and never for very long.

"We have to choose," the Doctor explained, and Rose nodded and listened to him, though it was possible she could have explained all this herself just as well. "This Universe is unravelling. If it comes undone, nothing else can stay intact."

"Universes like a crazy quilt, I understand."

"Exactly," the Doctor agreed. "However, if we try to fix this one, it will unravel anyway. Everything is strained to the point of shredding and time's gone out of any sort of control here. One more push and..."

"And everything dies," Rose interrupted. "What's the other option?"

"Removing it from the equation."

Rose frowned. "So this Universe will suffer what, total entropic collapse?"

"Only if we try to patch it again. The more you put things together, the more they keep falling apart..."

"And this place has gotten to the point that we're trying to save a skyscraper with superglue, I get that. But how can we take it out if we can't touch it?"

He reached over and touched the console. "This TARDIS," he said, reverently. "It's grown into the World, backward and forward and sideways in time, ancient beyond any understanding of the word. It's the only thing keeping this universe functioning at all."

"It's what moves the World in and out of reality," Rose realized.

The Doctor nodded. "It's been the only way to keep the World and reality intact at the same time."

"So it can, what, take the whole universe out like it takes the World?"

It was huge, knowing what he knew now, but what was worse was the feeling that he had always known it and had just never wanted to live with it before. "Sort of. It's more sealing it off entirely, with a bit of turning itself inside out around it."

Rose was quiet for a long moment. "So this universe is dead, either way."

"Not exactly." He stroked a panel on the console, his hand safe and secure there, comfortable and comforting at once. It felt right, even righter than looking up to see Rose regarding him with absolute trust. "It will - echo. This universe will become a closed system, sealed up forever. There will have to be rules laid down for it, of course, because no other reality like it can ever be allowed to exist."

"But you can do that, can't you?"

He rocked back on his heels, smiling warmly through the terrible truth. Her golden brown gaze was bright, like sunlight, strengthening him. "I am a Time Lord," he said simply, an absolute fact. 

"I knew you could do it," she said, and she smiled, and her absolute confidence was breathtaking and terrible at once. "So we can be together, then?"

It hurt, it hurt, it hurt. "Oh, Rose."

"Doctor," she pleaded, her voice tiny, her trembling hand reaching toward him, carefully.

He couldn't look at her, it hurt too much. "You have to travel on from here, Wolf. You can't stay."

"What? No..."

"The stars are going out," he reminded her, something he hadn't known until he'd seen it in her memories. 

She was so strong, a thing of gold and fire, as she looked at him, very seriously. "I made my choice a long time ago, and I'm never gonna leave you."

"I know," he said. "And you won't. But I'm not the Doctor you have to find."

"But you could..."

"I could've been," he agreed, admitted. "But I have to make a choice, too, to save the lives that can be saved..."

"You're going to do that, though, right? We haven't done all this just so that everyone dies, have we?"

"No, Wolf," he replied, indignant, "no, of course not. If this works, if we make the right choices, then yes, the people survive."

"So save _us_!" Rose insisted. "It doesn't have to be like all this, but please."

"Why would..."

"It's going to hurt me," she said. "What's coming, what's going to happen. It's going to hurt so much. _'Sold for a song to a summer storm'_ , you heard... You're going to have control over this reality. Can't you... do something?"

"I don't know!" Anger was such an easy defense, the Storm that he carried with him everywhere a bitter ally. "Why did you let it happen? You've had control over everything, and that's still going to happen to you!"

She nodded, as powerful in her defeat as she'd ever been in her victories. "I know," she agreed. "And I don't understand why, not here, not now. Maybe someday, I will know why I chose to let these things happen to me, to us. But maybe in your new universe, maybe in another life, we can have... everything."

"You'll still have to go on, Rose. Even if you leave an echo behind, a Rose, there'll still be the Wolf walking through the walls, and you'll have to go on without the pain of remembering this. It's not fair to you..."

"But it is," she said. "I want to be with you, and I can't at the same time."

"Don't you see I won't be here?" he snapped. "I'll be bunging up the entirety of creation in my head. I'll be lucky to come out better than a turnip."

"Do you want this?" she demanded. "Us, this, all these things you seemed to want, all the things you said you wanted while we traveled here? Do you want that?"

"More than anything, ever."

"Then change it. You can regenerate, if you put that in there, if you let me help you. I know you can. You'll be you and I'll be me, and maybe we won't remember the choices we made here, but we can still make them, for ourselves, for once. We can do this together and when it's over, there'll be us here, and others of us doing what we're meant to do elsewhere."

"I don't want to hurt you."

"Then stop." She put a hand on his arm. "Doctor, I've seen things, great and terrible things, beautiful things and the end of my world. I was there for my parent's wedding and I watched my father die twice. I've never had much faith in anything, but if I do believe in one thing, just the one, I believe in you."

"I believe in us," he answered, honestly. 

"She'll be with us, you know," Rose said, and gestured to the world around then, the ancient silver world of possibilities like spun-glass. "She's always with us - it's who She is."

"And who we are, too." The Doctor sighed and stroked the console, silent acknowledging the warmth of the idle welcome inside. He paused. "I'd like to be blond, this time," he decided.

She grinned. "Just not ginger," she agreed. 

He waggled his fingers at her. "Not ginger."

"Will we... know?"

"Not really. But I think it'll be in there. Maybe. We'll be ordinary people, you understand. As ordinary as it's possible for you to be, any way."

"Or you," she teased. "Not a bad life, though," Rose added, wrapping their fingers together.

"Better with us." The Doctor took their joined hands together, and touched the controls on the TARDIS, touched the heart of time itself, touched infinity. 

Died.

**

_I believe._

_Somewhere there is a universe, a small, sterile universe, where all the rules are kind. Perhaps everyone there is ordinary, or perhaps they all know that they are incredible, fantastic, impossible people, people who survived everything._

_There are worlds there, under strange stars, and somewhere in all those worlds, there are two people who belong together. Nothing of the sacrifice they might have made could possibly be known to them, but it is written in the stars none the less, and they travel between them in the company of one who knows all and keeps her secrets well._

_There's no Tree there, probably, but there's no blue box, either. Something, however, has become her disguise, and she cradles her children like she cradles her secrets, like she cradles all of time within her heart. And there, within her and beside her, are the two whom she chose, whom she loves, whom she goes exploring with, a Wolf of a girl, and a blond mad man, and maybe, just maybe, in this other life, they all live happily ever after._


End file.
